World, give me a break

I don’t know if you’re getting sick of reading my rants against the sexualising of children yet but I’m almost getting sick of writing them. If you can handle a little more on the topic then here’s a really intelligent interview at Salon with the author of The Lolita Effect, who just absolutely gets it right. Thanks to Corporate Babysitter for this. I can’t sing the praises of Corporate Babysitter enough. If you’re not already, you would  enjoy Lisa’s column, for instance there is also this (on the very convincing case for make believe for kids) to check out at the moment and this too (on a brand new and inspiring ‘unplug your kids’ on-line store) over there.

Some of that interview from Salon.

What are some of the distortions that girls learn from magazines and advertising about what girls’ sexuality is all about?

If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Sex is only about baring the body, and exhibiting the body, and especially girls’ bodies. That’s a very narrow definition of what sexuality is. At the same time, you can’t express yourself, you can’t enjoy your body, you can’t feel like your body is sexual unless you’ve got this perfect, sex goddess anatomy, which is something like a Barbie body. That’s ridiculous, too. It makes girls end up hating their bodies, and not enjoying their own sensuality and sexuality. That’s a real problem.

Then, there’s this insistence that younger and younger girls are sexual. There’s this huge emphasis on linking youth with sexuality. People mature sexually throughout their lives, and there is a lot of scientific evidence that women who are past menopause really enjoy sex. Children who are 12, 13 years old are not in a position to understand or cope with their sexuality very well. Linking sex to youthfulness is really dangerous.

Girls are always supposed to be changing their bodies and dressing up in order to attract male attention. There is not much emphasis on girls enjoying their own bodies, or even any reciprocity where boys might be thinking about what they could do to please girls. It’s not very mutual.

But aren’t boys also sold a very limited ideal of what it means to be sexual, too? Like all the pop culture references to pimps?

I think that male sexuality is defined in really narrow and limiting ways as well, but in the end, it ends up giving more power to boys. It actually hands it all off to them as being the arbiters of girls’ sexuality, and the ones who can make the sexual decisions.

Finally, here is a comment I wish to draw attention to from Shelley (who made this previous very meaty guest post on feminist maternal authority at blue milk) in response to my two posts on the Henson affair. I really enjoy Shelley’s thoughts on this topic, I find she always drives my thinking up a level.

The one thing that I think is also worth exploring a bit more is that while there is a large body of work scrutinising the voyeurism and activation of male gaze/authority over the ‘reclining’ still-life nude female form in art work, art criticism is less vocal on the subject of the politics of representing the adolescent form.

And while I appreciate Sasha’s eloquence and sophisticated thought on this issue, I’d like to point out, just for the record, there are plenty of images of these transitional beings in art (begin with Edvard Munch for particularly resonant Henson-like imagery of the exposed ‘virgin’ girl). I want to know too why Sasha and others needs to ’see’ herself/ her body/ the adolescent body, as a way to overcome shame of the body? How does this work? I’d hazard a guess that a lot of young women would look at Henson’s beautiful models and measure themselves against them, unfavourably, resulting in self-doubt and self-hatred. In actual fact, as Germaine Greer recently pointed out in her foray into this debate, these transitional female forms are abundant and normalised in our culture to the point where female adult models (i.e Kate Moss) have the bodies of 14-year-olds. In reality, we despise the middle-aged female form – a point that Greer has made elsewhere – and particularly the maternal body – sagging breasts, stretched stomach, marked skin, flat feet, wide hips… I’d consider Henson’s work important and radical if these bodies featured, at all. But we’re not; instead, we have these utterly overdetermined and idealised images of “vulnerable”, “threshold-crossing” bodies and we need to continue to ask why male baby boomers, like their predecessers in generations past, fixate on this stage of life and use these muses to express their longing for innocence, voyeuristic authority and control, elegies of loss and longing… These are legitimate readings of the text, and while the images I’ve seen are in fact quite beautiful (also a legitimate reading), the precursors (that bluemilk also talks about) are downright creepy, reminiscent of Larry Clark’s work, and invite voyeurism.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what Henson’s intention was (death of the ‘author’, anyone?), what matters is that all kinds of readings should be allowed, and not dismissed outrightly (a kind of subtle censorhip in itself )and labelled knee-jerk ‘moral hysteria.’