Abstract
The issue of the sexualization of girls has made its way into scholalry and popular literature. The author discusses various media myths of hyper-sexulaity in young girls and its potential problems.
A few decades ago, when someone said a girl was “in trouble,” it meant she was pregnant. Today, both mainstream media and scholarly research insist that the “trouble” with girls is that they are hyper-sexualized. Horror stories about teen promiscuity, eating disorders, and depression abound and pre-adolescent female sexualization, especially as depicted in contemporary media, is routinely suggested as the root cause of these troubles. According to the American Psychological Association’s 2007 Task Force Report on the Sexualization of Girls, exposure to sexualized media images produces the desire to mimic these images, which negatively shapes girls’ sense of self, subjectivity and activities. The message is that girls seek out the salacious adventures portrayed in the tabloids and that they value eroticism over intimacy and thrive on degradation. Emulating Playboy instead of Nancy Drew, we are told that girls are bypassing childhood and innocence in their quest to emulate pop culture and that the result is catastrophic.
This perspective on the sexualization of girls has made its way into scholarly as well as popular literature on pre-adolescent development and is common across the Anglophone West. For instance, Linda Papdopoulos, author of the 2010 Home Office Report to the British Government, reports that the commodification of women and girls is now so ingrained in our culture that it is a drip, drip effect with girls going out of their way to look like porn stars. In Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualization of Girls, author Melinda Tankard Reist claims that young women today embrace their own degrading objectification. She cites pole dancing, once the exclusive province of women in strip clubs, as an example of the ways this sexual degradation has moved into women’s homes and exercise classes.
When reading this literature it is hard not to grab your daughter and batten down the hatches. But before we overreact we must ask if these claims about the negative impact of sexual images are in fact true. Do they result in girls who are hyper-sexualized and suffer from promiscuity, a future in the sex industry and a myriad of other disorders? You don’t have to be a formal researcher to notice that there has been a pronounced increase in the number of sexual images of girls and young women in mainstream media. But what is up for debate is how real girls perceive and respond to this material.
Vanessa Lamounier de Assis (
Popular media depicts legions of girls jumping over the fences of middle-class respectability to the nearest strip club to take off their tops for a Girls Gone Wild video and then hook up with the nearest stranger. But the empirical picture is far more complicated. For instance, in contrast to sexualization literature claiming that media and commodities produce an unyielding desire for promiscuity, recent studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found a marked decrease in teens who said they had slept with four or more people over their lifetime (from 18.7 percent in 1991 to 13.8 percent in 2009). Similarly, recent data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior indicate that, far from this image of rampant “hooking up,” masturbation is the most common sexual practice among 14- to-15-year-olds; 62 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls report engaging in this form of solitary autoeroticism. The CDC’s “National Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” which focuses on students in grades 9 through 12 in the United States, describes similar downward trends in onset of first sex and an increase in condom use.
Research by the Kaiser Foundation in 2003 showed that when asked why they were not having sex, 43 percent of 14- to 18-year-olds said they wanted to wait until they were in a committed relationship. The majority of teens also felt that delaying sex relations helped them stay in control of a relationship (91 percent), and insured the respect of parents (91 percent) and friends (84 percent). Many did not want to worry about pregnancy and/or sexually transmitted infections (79 percent). The reasons these teens gave for having sex were equally complex, and ranged from curiosity (85 percent), love (69 percent), and feeling like the time was right (82 percent) to hoping it would make a relationship closer (70 percent), wanting to get it over with (58 percent) and being under the influence (18 percent). These findings don’t negate the challenges or difficulties associated with sexual decision-making, or the ways in which gendered pressure or homophobia can become a significant factor in these activities. However, they do suggest that the context in which young people make sexual choices is multifaceted and involves more agency and thought than the simple mimicry behavior suggested by the recent sexualization literature.
Ethnographic research on girls and media suggests an equally nuanced picture. Girls are neither completely passive in their understanding and reading of sexuality and popular culture, nor are they completely agentic. At base, their reception and identification of popular culture is deeply complicated. Psychologists Sue Jackson and Elizabeth Westrupp found that postfeminist magazines fostered knowledge about a variety of sexual practices, but that girls often positioned themselves in complex ways in terms of these practices, such as make-up, relationships and even fandom (for example, girls who loved Miley Cyrus’s music were deeply critical of her posing nude in Vanity Fair).
Jackson and Westrupp argue that instead of drawing the focus on the regulation of girls (yet again) it would seem rather more useful at this point to widen the lens to how magazines like Girl-friend conceptualize their readership and whether and how they engage with contemporary debates about sexual media and young girls. In their conversations with British tweens, communication scholars, David Buckingham and Sara Bragg found that girls and boys were skeptical of advertisements, television, and magazines, and at times had an almost moralistic aversion to the sex portrayed by these media sources—particularly when discussing the dangers it could pose to younger viewers. Media may, in fact, make some young people feel pressured to have sex, but it may make others more sexually aware and responsible. For others still, it might provide a positive site of affirmation for sexual desire. The same person can experience a multitude of complex, even contradictory reactions to media messages.
There are numerous studies that make it clear that girls are not nearly as wild, promiscuous, or out-of-control as the literature on sexualization portrays them. However, the persistent inflammatory tone of this sexualization discourse in a variety of venues (including academic and popular publications, news articles, blogs, and government reports) suggests that something else is going on. One possibility is that the fears of sexualization reflect an increasing disparity between rich and poor and the decline of the security of the middle class.
Throughout history, girls—and especially “sexual” girls—have often been a scapegoat or site of transference for cultural anxiety. There is a scapegoating logic present in the current sexualization discourse that works to protect one group (white, middle class, and heterosexual girls) while marginalizing working class girls and girls of color (through conceptions of the “skank,” or in British slang, the “chav”). These distinctions promote a pecking order within girl culture, but more than this, adults use them to decide who is acceptable, who should be sanctioned, and who is in need of psychological, medical or spiritual intervention. When sexualization is cast as “pathology,” it ultimately makes girls the problem. It also creates a dangerous binary between innocence and sexualization, casting the over-sexualized girl as damaged and pathological.
Throughout history, girls—and especially “sexual” girls—have often been scapegoated.
The sexualization thesis dominating contemporary media eclipses the evidence that girls and boys in the United States today are more sexually responsible than in previous generations, and perpetuates the myth that people engage with media uncritically and uniformly. Perhaps more significantly, this emphasis on hyper-sexualization may actually create new problems for girls by vilifying their sexuality rather than interrogating the sexism, racism and classism embedded in the media message.