To dream the impossible dream
So tell me something I don’t know.
A report of the American Psychological Association (APA) released today found evidence that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is harmful to girls’ self-image and healthy development…Sexualization was defined by the task force as occurring when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.
How could it not be harmful, for chrissake? What would it be, beneficial? How could it possibly be beneficial? Unless of course your dearest ambition from infancy on is to be a prostitute, and you never once deviate from that burning ambition. But barring that, how could it be beneficial?
In a way this is just a variant of that horrible (albeit evasive, cautious) pronouncement of Tariq Ramadan’s: ‘But the body must not be forgotten…In Islamic tradition, women are seen in terms of being mothers, wives or daughters.’ That’s an evasive, cautious way of putting it because what he means is ‘and nothing else,’ but he presumably didn’t want to say that to Ian Buruma or in the New York Times. At any rate, the outcome is the same: a person’s value comes only from her sexual appeal or behavior, or from her maternal or sexual function; she is, in short, a thing for the use of other people – primarily, of men, since if she produces daughers, they’re in the same situation, while sons are not. Women and girls are for others, men are for themselves and others and a range of other possibilities. This is the problem with the sexualization of girls.
I see that as a problem even in the absence of any reports from the APA. It’s a problem because of the implicit message, which is that females are supposed to be hotties, that that is by a very wide margin their chief obligation, that that’s what they’re for, that’s what they’re about, that’s what they do. I think this is a kind of death in life. The death of alternatives, of other possibilities, of hope, of breadth, of wide horizons, of a range of choices. It’s a horrible nasty pouty flicky twisty curvy silky little box. It’s the obverse of the niqab, but it’s pretty damn confining itself. It’s as if there is one and only one job open to women: that of lap dancer. There was one and only one job open to Jane Fairfax and Jane Eyre; I’m not sure the horizontal move to lap dancer is much of an advance.
“It’s the obverse of the niqab, but it’s pretty damn confining itself.”
I was thinking a similar thing myself when I read in the Telegraph report today of Tesco selling a ‘Peekaboo Lap Dancing’ kit marketted at children, complete with fake dollar bills to stick in the garter. Stuck between the rock of religious misogyny and whatever kind of hard place a children’s lap dancers’ outfit represents is a poor choice all round.
Ewwwwww.
Time for fourth wave feminism, or something.
Around a year or so ago I remember walking through a British town-centre with a friend of mine and us both stopping dead outside a branch of one of the high-street chain stores. We’d both seen a wall-sized poster just inside the window of a girl who looked to be around thirteen years-old. She’d been portrayed quasi-sexually which was disturbing enough, but also looked to be tearstained and generally upset, like she’d been abused. We just couldn’t understand it and no one else seem to be taking any notice. I was aware of a general trend in that direction but hadn’t seen it expressed quite so overtly. It was surreal and slightly nauseating.
I was going to grab an anti-reactionary position and write about the role of fashion in defining and claiming status among peers, which only indirectly is sexualising. Young girls have to act like young women, and learn their way.
However, Ed’s example above is very bothersome indeed. I think its the lack of GROUNDING in moral principles (of course due to a secularised state education) of today’s people.
I too have an example. My own daughter of 12 was in a primary school choir invited to sing for a local radio station. THey were given the song by the station rep, and it was the little hip-hop number that ends ‘Hope I getcha naked by the end of this song!’. A couple of mothers raised objections in the context of primary school girls singing in public – they were spot on. The thing is the radio people were gobsmacked that anyone could object! Their demographic was the late teen to thirty singles, and to them life is clubbing and taking a new prize home any night they want. (I say this from listening to the station over some time.)
In my opinion, there is no moral anchor at all there – except PC ‘Thou Shalt Not Diss the Black or the Gay’. Sexual exploitation of children? ‘Nah, we don’t do that, because we don’t think about anything but style and sex.’
BTW the comment about secularised state education was NOT SERIOUS. My state education was secular too, and pretty OK.
Methinks you protest too much. You are not restricted to “be a hottie OR be a brain surgeon”. You can be both. Being sexually attractive is *one thing* you can be. It doesn’t exclude the many other things you can be. And we partly are for others, not just for yourselves. The aggressive individualism you often put forward here is almost equally as distasteful as the repression of individualism you rail against.
Having said that, I think the sexualisation of girls is a manifestation of all that’s wrong with materialism as a cultural choice. Making attractiveness and wealth our yardsticks has been a big mistake. I often edit financial stuff that describes very rich people as “high net worth individuals”, and can’t help thinking, well, I’m relatively impoverished but am I not worth the same? Of course, in this world, I am not.
Perhaps I should point out that the store I mentioned above was indeed a girl’s-trendy-clothing store. Oh, and apologies for my disgraceful grammar.
But surely, OB, a quick scan of magazines, etc, aimed at pre-pubescent girls would show you that fluffy objects of desire, festooned in revealing and primarily lurid pink clothing, is what they all WANT to be…
Who are we to deny their aspirations?
;-)
Erm, stop it, I like it!
Or something ……
To get all the sexploitation you can handle just watch MTV Base or Kiss for a few minutes. No signs there of any possibility for young women other than the most degrading.
(GT – I suggest you have a bucket of cold water handy)
Surely women are, in this sense, less sexualised than they were, say, 50 plus years ago.
Then a woman’s value was largely dependent on the wealth etc of the man she could marry. And, by and large, she worked hard to compete in this contest.
Now very many women are valued by very many other characteristics.
She may choose to use her physical qualities – perhaps because that is the best thing she has going for her or perhaps because she enjoys doing it – but she has many more choices available. And those choices are illustrated in the media at all levels.
Incidentally, it has bothered me that we look down upon a woman who aspires to be a beauty queen and admire one who hasd a PhD. Each is using the qualities she was given in life’s lottery. Beauty and intelligence are both inherited characteristics – or, to be precise, sets of characteristics.
MTV Base?
Kiss? ( and not the acronym K.I.S.S!)
I presume these are USA TV offerings?
Cable?
ken — umm, no, actually. Whatever we may say about the C19 or early C20 attitude to women’s social role, it did acknowledge that they were thinking and feeling beings, who had a life-course, through which they would pass, gaining responsibility and respect en route [in an idealised, angel-in-the-house way, maybe, but even so]. These were questions, amongst other things, of moral values, to which people could be educated, and might aspite to fulfil through their efforts – as indeed, equally, were the feminist values of self-fulfilment through education and service that others of the same period aspired to.
Women today — or shall we say ‘girls’ — are presented with a set of images which define them by their physical appearance. Tout court, as the French say, with the exception of their willingness to lay that physical body down for sexual pleasure. Now, I’m not knocking physical pleasure, as empty experiences go it’s one of the best. But empty it is, and all too often gratuitously exploitative. It has no expectation of a life-course, no enhancement of individual dignity through self-development — unless you really do count breast-enlargement as a addition to one’s moral and intellectual armament. It encourages a focus on youth at the expense of maturity, on physical appearance at the expense of moral character, and on sexual availability at the expense of self-respect. It is not, in a word, your mamma’s old-fashioned misogyny. Just a fresh, bright, clean new one.
“Women today — or shall we say ‘girls’ — are presented with a set of images which define them by their physical appearance. Tout court, as the French say, with the exception of their willingness to lay that physical body down for sexual pleasure. “
But that’s not really true, is it? No more than when my parentrs said the same things about my genertion. Young girls have all sorts of role models presented to them most of which are very much not passive sexual stereotypes. There was no Buffy when I was a boy.
ChrisPer writes:-
“Their demographic was the late teen to thirty singles, and to them life is clubbing and taking a new prize home any night they want. (I say this from listening to the station over some time.)”
There is a curse you make to young male lechers:-
“May you have very pretty daughters.”
Dr Zen,
“Being sexually attractive is *one thing* you can be. It doesn’t exclude the many other things you can be.”
You read carelessly; I’ve noticed it before. You seem to have missed ‘implicit’ and ‘as if’.
“And we partly are for others, not just for yourselves.”
Meaning what? We partly are for others therefore girls and women have a moral obligation to be sexual objects? Of course we partly are for others, but that doesn’t mean we are others’ tools, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean that women are more for others than men are.
I must say, this, or the thought behind it, is sticking in my mind –
“The aggressive individualism you often put forward here is almost equally as distasteful as the repression of individualism you rail against.”
I find that, especially as a response to a feminist criticism, a really intensely distasteful remark. Women who dislike cultural pressure to be sex toys are ‘putting forward’ ‘aggressive individualism.’ Welcome to 1969. What next, accusations of bra-burning?
Who is this Dr Zen? It says weird stuff.
“they do seem to be conditioned on women being sexual agents, rather than non-beings as they are in you-know-where.”
I really don’t think so. They’re not portrayed as agents – they’re portrayed as passents; they’re sort of actively passive. They participate, they’re not shoved in the back room, but they participate in passivity. The images that are the subject of the report are not of strong active muscular alert women, they’re of squashy seductive transported wide-open women. They’re also not of women who could be engaged in some other activity, who could go off and do some work or climb a tree.
Of course there are differences between the niqab approach and the mid-orgasm woman on every magazine cover approach. But both of them reduce women to, basically, their genitals. I prefer to think we’re more than that. But then I’m the boring old 70s-style radical feminist type.
I told Cathal to take a break last time I got irritated with him, and he seems to have complied.
“They’re also not of women who could be engaged in some other activity, who could go off and do some work or climb a tree.”
OB I have never met a woman like the ones thusly portrayed. All the women I know or have known in my, er, many years of life could and often did go off to do some work and most, at some time, also climbed trees.
The approach you are describing is as far from reality as, say, whatever the dumb father is called in the Simpsons.Both are cartoon characters unlikely to influence anyone (well, few few).
There are feminist battles still to be fought – in most countries, this one has been one.
Clumsy fingers – third last line “very few”, last line “won”.
ken, yeah, but you don’t walk into grocery stores and pass the magazine shelf and see nothing but Homer Simpsons on the cover of every magazine. Homer Simpsons are hardly ubiquitous in the way that sexually stunned women are. Maybe ubiquitous images have no effect; I certainly hope so; but I find it hard to believe.
OB: Homer S has more visibility than all the magazines put together (look at circulation figures: magazines are dying, which perhaps explains their desperation to attract buyers by dramatic (?) covers. Mens’ magazines are dying faster than womens’)).
The last time I had a haircut I did a survey of womens’ magazines. The contents were pretty dumb but I did not see any “sexually stunned” women.I have not done similar research into mens’ magazines.
Enough.
Ken – but wouldn’t the decline of men’s magazines involving sexualized imagery of stunned women pre-, mid- and post-orgasm have something to do with the wide availability of such imagery on the web?
This said, I think non-sexualized televised advertisements of women going extatic over a new kind of laundry detergent do a lot more harm to society’s perception of women than the most abject pornography. Why not, for a chance, women going extatic over a new racing car or the new Pentium processor, for a chance?
MdeS: Could be, though all magazines are in decline – some more than others.
I, for one, would not respect a woman going ecstatic over a new racing car or a new Pentium processor. But over a recording of the Beethoven Quartets – Oh yes, yes, yes!