The problem with sexy children

This look: correct in women, totally perverse in children

Sexualisation: a buzzword for feminists, Christians and conservative party leaders. Most people agree it's a Bad Thing, particularly when it happens to our delicate little children, who must be protected. If sexualisation is impacting upon children, says everybody, then, and only then, must we take rigorous measures to oppose it. In particular, we must complain about Rihanna dancing on X-Factor in her too-risque undies, and make sure that schoolgirls wear trousers so that they don't invite sexual assault. In case you were face-palming there, let's just say that the latter policy clearly springs from the same mind that wrote the hilarious joke: 'what's the leading cause of peodophilia?'... 'sexy children'.

A desultory review of the internet literature on sexualisation reveals that it's affecting children everywhere. It pervades our culture through magazines, 'pornstar' slogans on children's clothing, under-wired bras for little girls, music videos (though the fixation is on female pop stars, not the male hip hop artists who use naked-gyrating-women as legal tender), television generally, and so on. These impressionable young minds see it, take it in, and start acting like sexy adults far too young. The solution, therefore, apparently, is to stop our children seeing sex-related things. 

Of course it would be totally fine if she was a bit older..

The most recent governmentally commissioned research on this, the Bailey Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood, deliberately fails to define sexualisation. That's because it was written by a man whose agenda is not anti-sexualisation, but anti-sex. For Bailey, 'sexualisation' is just convenient modern jargon to slip a right-wing agenda under the policy radar.

Let's stop pretending that children and young adolescents don't have sexualities. Don't you remember your furtive childhood wanks? It's simply ridiculous to believe that sexuality rightfully gets switched on when we reach the age of consent, as if the benchmark 'sixteen' represents anything other than an arbitrary regulatory decision of the state.

The problem is not sex but its cultural implementation, and an aspect of that is the difference between sex and sexualisation. Part of me doesn't want my figurative children to find out just how limiting, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc, adult women's cultural sexual representation is, but I'm not going to sit around acting as if stopping them from seeing the images does anything to stop the images-as-messages from being there.

Girls are not sexualised because they develop and experience their own sexualities, nor are children-who-must-be-protected generally sexualised because they have sex. Girls are sexualised, rather, because women's and girl's sexualities are still culturally defined in a way that detaches genuine sexual pleasure from the body, replacing it with a narrow, limiting appearance of (submissive) arousal. Ariel Levy was saying something similar to this six years ago, by the way. Why is it considered sexy for women but not men to wear make-up, heels and lingerie? (I personally think men in make-up, heels and lingerie are incredibly sexy, but I seem to be the perverse minority)

The Bailey Review correctly identifies sexualised products, but doesn't really pick up on the other problems that comprise sexualisation: the normalisation of a particular kind of sexy-woman standard that all women are held up as wanting against. Sexualisation is a horrifically gendered thing whereby men sexually consume agency devoid women-commodities. The extensive possibilities for and variations in peoples' sexualities are denied except where they match the man-fucks-sexy-woman standard. I recognise that some women get off perfectly well under the popular narrative, which is great for them, but even as much as sexuality reflects society, many still cannot fit the box.

There is a fundamental problem with the idea that sexualisation is terrible up until the age of sixteen, at which point it's all fine and normal (The Bailey Review uses the term 'premature sexualisation'!) It's sad that girls will have to resist everything the sexualised society tells them about themselves, their desires and their bodies, in order to have fulfilling sex lives. Yet I would almost prefer that they learn about it early so that they can start developing the critical tools to call it out for what it is - a fabricated belief system of the misogynist imagination. Perhaps children should know their enemy. 

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Quote from website: 'Talk about branding, their logo was placed right behind all the girls and the entire room was memorized by the view.'

On the mass-marketable battleground that is the world of public imagery, women and girls are merging. Conceptually and physically. We are seeing an ever increasing sexualisation of female children and, simultaneously, the infantilisation of female adults. Much has been written already about the ways in which little girls are now encouraged to present as commercially sexual female adults - Bratz dolls and the insidious creep of the Playboy brand are just two cases in point. But there's another side to this coin: an increasing, dangerous, boiling down of women-into-sexual-girls.

Now, it's not at all groundbreaking to suggest that women have traditionally been treated like children. Pre-women's lib and let's face it, post-women's lib in most countries and most places, it's not uncommon to see women regularly othered as girls. This method of control is nothing new, but it is slightly distinct from a modern tendency concerning the way in which society genders the recipient bodies of sexual desire. As our girl-children are now, in many places, becoming fair sexual game, we are seeing a corresponding relegation of 'female sexuality'. It seems to me that the lack of body hair in mainstream imagery depicting women sexually is just the first stage on the way to a writing out of women as acceptably sexual. Naming is a powerful factor here: how often are fully grown women now referred to as 'girls' whenever a heteronormative sexuality is at question? And how often do we question it? There is now, seemingly, rarely a 'woman' in mainstream pornography - girls become MILFs, then GILFs. Pop groups like Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls have done nothing to help here. Perhaps the Spice Women would have been less disgustingly post-feminist.

Anyway, if you aren't convinced, type 'girls' into google search, you'll see what I mean (incidentally, my scientific research was conducted with safesearch on moderate. It makes little difference). Type 'young girls' into the main google search. Shockingly, the entire first page of links are porn-related, but (I hope - as the perhaps slightly lesser of two evils) that they feature pictures of women, not actual children.

One worrying thing about this trend is that the idea of a commercially sexual girl should be all rights be oxymoronic. Of course I don't dispute that many children have a kind of sexuality: that's not the point. Any second-waver worth their salt will tell you that gender just is sexual being, a main difference between a woman and a girl (apart from extra lashings of repression, prejudice, etc) is an emotionally and physically mature expression of sexuality. When women can't exhibit sexuality with the het-norm public's approval except 'as girls' there is something drastically, hideously wrong.

Why is this happening? Well it's only a theory, but I think this is just one more backlash. We know that feminism works in epicycles - no sooner do we, post-Female Eunuch, claim our sexualities as our own, claim the right to enjoy sex, the right to expect orgasm, and indeed, the right to be sexual aggressively, than the patriarchal machine takes that aggressive sexuality and infantilises it, reclaims it as something childish, something controllable, something ultimately passive. If all commercially sexual women are just girls, the male viewer seems justified on his pedestal of superiority. If women are just girls, then female sexuality is back to unthreatening old male-centricity.

A sexual woman is a force to be reckoned with and a person to be admired, and treated with respect. A sexual girl is not something that should ever be on a website. Women and girls are rightfully distinct, let's keep it that way.