Entries Tagged 'Sexualization of Girls' ↓

Have you seen the stories about the Pornification of Halloween with alarming photos of girls who, it is implied, look more like “porn fantasies” than little girls playing dress up?

I wrote one of them a few years ago.

That was before I read So Sexy So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. and Jean Kilbourne Ed.D. which clearly explained that girls haven’t become hyper-sexualized at all. Marketers and Advertisers have hyper-sexualized girls in an attempt to exploit children’s inherent innocent sexuality for profit.

This has nothing to do with our GIRLS.

This is MARKETING and a culture that increasingly applies distorted versions of adult sexuality to young girls for it’s own sexual entertainment.

Young girls did not become sexier or more sexual – our sexual imagery in advertising, marketing and pornography from Lolita to ads for gym socks started applying adult sexuality to young girls – for kicks and profit.

Girls had nothing to do with this.

Parents had nothing to do with this.

As I look at the photos of the above costumes this year, I’m not seeing anything inappropriate. Every girl, save the pirate with a bare midriff, is fully clothed. A pirate, a jailer, a witch and a maid. All appropriate choices for Halloween. If pornography hadn’t exploited younger and younger looking girls connected with this imagery there would be no “hyper-sexuality” about them.

They are wearing make-up. It’s Halloween. The holiday calls for make-up, as much as they want to cake on. It’s fantastical dress-up for heaven’s sake.

All the hype is marketing and it further sexualizes and exploits girls.

This type of marketing and reporting is incredibly disrespectful to all girls. It’s incredibly disrespectful to parents.

If pornography weren’t increasingly taking a pedophiliac turn, the costumes of the above girls would be what they are: Little Girls Playing Dress Up.

The little girls are the truth – innocent, lovely and with an inherent right to be immune to adult perversions of their authentic sexuality. The costumes are fantastical dress up. It is the adults who apply pornographic thoughts to them. It’s unfair. It’s exploitive.

The adults looking at them are putting their own pornographic imagery on top of them and marketers not only know this, but play it up for bigger profits. This is in no way about the little girls’ sexuality. It is, instead, about the sexuality adult consumers, marketers and pornographers inappropriately and exploitively put on little girls.

The thing is . . . as parents it is not our job to go around making sure our daughters do not fit into other people’s porn fantasy. Their porn fantasy is their responsibility and we truly have no control over it. They have hyper-sexualized innocence with Catholic School Girls, Cheerleaders, Fairies and nearly every other feminine imagery that might be a source of fun and power for little girls. They will continue to do so. People who choose to sexualize children, or infantalize women, for their own sexual fantasies will apply their perverted sexuality to small children regardless of what little girls wear on Halloween, what they wear to play sports in, what they wear to school and what they wear to play in.

What are little girls REALLY wearing on Halloween?

Fantastical costumes that the holiday calls for. We owe it to girls to lay off their sexuality and stop applying adult distortions of sexuality to innocent children who have a right to be immune to it.

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There is a new organization with seasoned players taking on the sexualization of girls, SPARK Summit. SPARK is organizing a Summit – Spark Summit on Oct 22.

SPARK Summit will launch an intergenerational movement to support and stand with girls. The SPARK Summit will engage girls to be part of the solution rather than to protect them from the problem, to give them the tools they need to become activists, organizers, researchers, policy influencers, and media makers, pushing back against the increasingly sexualized images of girlhood in the media and creating room for whole girls.

If, like myself, you can’t make the New York City location, SPARK Summit is Virtual.

The virtual summit will be a live, interactive broadcast on the web. Registrants will be engaged live for a full day with the main goings-on at the Summit. Virtual registrants will be able to ask questions of the speakers, interact with other virtual participants, participate in mobile advocacy shout-outs, and lend their voices to the effort to challenge the sexualization of young women and girls on Summit Day and throughout the year. More information about how to participate will arrive in your email inbox in October (if you register).

Register here. Girls 14-17 are encouraged to attend with a parent or guardian’s permission.

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I’ve noticed a trend in literature in the last few years: gratuitous rape scenes. Specifically gratuitous anal rape combined with demented torture.

I find this trend disturbing and I’ve boycotted the authors.

Not a sort of “I hate you now and I’ll never read you again,” boycott.

More of a “I don’t trust you now and I don’t want your demented images floating around in my head,” boycott.

The latest was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  I could have done without the very graphic descriptions of torture, the very demented mix of sexuality and violence.

It’s not only in the fiction of male authors. It seems female authors are going for the emotional jugular and shock value as well. Specifically I’ll mention Kira Silak’s The White Mary and one of Janet Evonovich’s numbered novels. Both had incredibly horrific imagery of vaginal mutilation and anal rape.

I’ve gotten to where I don’t read much of the thriller mystery genre anymore.

It’s particularly disturbing when the author feels it necessary to graphically describe the rape, anal rape and torture of his or her own protagonist. Often times by someone they love or have a relationship with. Then the protagonist will spend maybe a day or a few hours washing herself off and going about her business, as if this is just what women should expect of the world and the men they are involved with.

There is a disturbing underlying emotion of hatred of female sexuality, a hatred of females in and of themselves, an objectification that goes beyond a one-night-stand-use-them-for-pleasure into women-are-disposable ideology. It’s an absurd notion that the witnessing of such horrific deeds – fiction or otherwise – passes for harmless entertainment in the plots of the stories.

It makes me wonder several disturbing things like:

How many men are jacking off to these images and creating an attraction to the mingling of misogyny, a fear and loathing of normal female sexuality and taking an an erotic pleasure in climaxing at the moment of a woman’s mutilation and even her naked death?

It also makes me wonder about the female audience. Why are we passively consuming graphic descriptions of rape, violence and torture of women in mass quantities of mainstream literature, music, television, movies and online porn and not offended by it?

I think there’s something wrong with both the men and women who are not offended. Mass desensitization to sexually violent misogyny can’t bode well for us.

It’s a form of vicarious rape of the masses of femininity.  I don’t know whether its intent, in all cases, is to “keep women in their place” making sure that they’re aware of and just a little frightened about their physical vulnerability in this world – but I do think that’s the effect of it.

For more on this theory check out Misogynistic Violence for Breakfast where I discuss the sexuality violent graphic nature of commercials during family programming time.

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Statistics from Respect RX:

• 1 in every 2 females worldwide has been abused during her lifetime.
• 50% of teens in serious relationships say they’ve gone against their beliefs to please their partner, including going further sexually than they wanted.
• 1 in 5 teens who’ve been in a serious relationship report being hit, slapped or pushed by a partner.
• 3 out of 10 teen girls become pregnant.
• 1 in 3 students drop out of high school.
• 4 in 10 teen boys have a criminal record.

Simply unacceptable. Don’t accept it. Change it.

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Teen leaders, parents, church leaders, and schools can order a new Respect RX Kit for $225.

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• use the Respect Basics to build self-respect and make healthy choices
• value themselves
• follow their passions
• set boundaries and speak up
• listen to their gut and compassionately listen to others
• create relationships based on mutual respect
• get help dealing with disrespect dilemmas, such as peer pressure, dating and domestic violence, bullying, negative body image, the “-isms” and other tough issues
• lead social change to create a better world where all people are respected

After completing just four sessions of our program, teens report notable outcomes:

• 98% of 500 teens surveyed understood the difference between respect and disrespect (up from 51% prior to the program)
• 90% of teens respected each other as equals (up from 65%)
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• 94% said they feel more comfortable setting boundaries and speaking up (up from 70%)
• 81% said they will get help when they were disrespected or to achieve their goals (up from 42%)

Order your Respect RX Kit here.

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Newsweek has an article about a phenomenon called Reproductive Coercion.

Essentially, the male in the relationship is coercing the female to become pregnant so he can control her forever, through the child. After the baby, he reasons, he’ll be able to control her forever. Her odds of leaving him to find another man lessen and he will have more control over the rest of her life. Having a baby only strengthens her resolve to stay in a dangerous relationship.

New research suggests that reproductive coercion is often found where physical and emotional abuse is found. Controlling his partner is the same motivator as all other forms of abuse, and one of the mechanisms for controlling his partner is trying to get her pregnant.

He may insist she not use birth control, monitor her menstrual cycle, flush birth control pills down the toilet, forbid her from seeing a doctor or going to a family planning clinic, and refuse to use a condom or poke a hole in one.

Like domestic and dating violence, the rate of reproductive coercion for teenage girls mirrors the rate for adult women.

The difference being that teenage girls have little experience with relationships and often don’t know that what is happening to them is wrong, dangerous, controlling or abusive.

The boundary between reproductive coercion and relationship violence—and whether there is, in fact, a boundary at all—is a difficult issue for health-care providers to address. In some cases, it can fit a spectrum of other abusive behaviors, from threatening to physical violence, that create an imbalance in a relationship’s power dynamic. “Just like violence, it’s a power thing,” says Walker, who has seen patients whose boyfriends monitor their periods to ensure they’re not taking Depo-Provera contraceptive shots (which often cause women to skip their period). “The man is taking away a woman’s power to decide she’s not going to have a child. Still, the line is unclear. Miller, for example, would be hesitant to categorize reproductive coercion as a form of partner violence, since many states have laws mandating reporting of such incidents. “I’m not sure that a young woman telling me that her partner flushed her birth control down the toilet necessitates me reporting that to the authorities,” says Miller. In these situations, Miller has two concerns: getting the teenager onto a birth control she can hide from her partner (possibly Depo-Prevera shots, which last three months and are administered at a doctor’s office) and building a relationship with the patient to explore the possibility of ending the relationship.” What we hear from domestic-violence survivors is they don’t like being told they have to leave a relationship,” says Miller. “So instead of saying, ‘This is an abusive relationship,’ our counseling is very much focused on having them explain how this affects their health.”

In every situation, every abusive relationship is about control.

The best prevention is to talk with your daughter about her right and responsibility to control her own body, her own mind, her own choices, her own life, her own future, her own decisions, her own reproductive system, her own friends, her own job, etc.

To control ourselves is our inherent birthright.

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