| Insight - Objectifying female children |
[23 Apr 2007|09:55pm] |
Watched this stupid show Insight today about the increase of sexualised behaviour in children. Recently some ‘experts’ from the Australia Institute (none of whom are feminists) did this study, into the sexualisation of children in advertisement and media. They were concerned that the sexualisation of children was unhealthy. They called the phenomenon ‘corporate pedophilia’. The report has sparked a lot of media attention and all of the shows I’ve seen on the report have been very dismissive to the point where they explicitly state that the images, which were included in the report, were just celebrating childhood and had nothing sexual about them.
The researchers pointed to the fact that the child models (all of whom were female) were usually in adult model poses and were scantily clad. They said that the reason that people could see nothing wrong with the pictures is because our environment is constantly saturated by similar imagery that people no longer see the highly sexualised nature of the pictures as abnormal.
Insight had a guest on the show Dr Joe Tucci who worked with children exhibiting sexualised behaviour. His agency worked with between 400-500 children in the past five years who have been engaging in presumably heteronormative sexual behaviour at early ages. Tucci said that while 50% of these children often had some prior history of sexual abuse 50% of the children did not. It was his opinion that the increasing sexualisation of childhood was the cause of this.
The example that was shown on the show was this 10 year old boy who would take his 6 year old sister out of the room where his parents were in, take her into his room, close the door, take her into his cupboard, close the door, tell her that what they were about to do was a secret and that mummy and daddy would be very upset with her if they found out and then proceeded to rape her. The parents did not find out about this happening straight away. It seems as if this happened several times before they found out. This 10 year old had no prior experience of sexual assault or even exposure to pornography. The parents were baffled as to explain what had prompted his behaviour.
Tucci and the study done by the Australia Intitute is convinced that exposure to sexualised images, any sexualised image even images of adults, is what is causing these children to exhibit premature sexual behaviour.
The lack of any kind of feminist analysis on the show was not all that surprising. But these are the links they failed to make. The sexualisation of children is not actually the sexualisation of children but rather the objectification of female peoples, whether child or woman. This has specific power relational implications which are designed to reinforce a specific idea of sexuality which maintains and buffers male supremacy. The bodies marketed and traded and exchanged like so much meat are not children’s bodies but female bodies. This is not an uncommon or recent phenomenon but it is one that patriarchy has a hell of a lot invested in, namely the right and will for men to control women and children. So why would anyone see anything wrong with the sexualisation of children if the sexualisation of children is really the objectification of women? Didn’t all that feminist crap get done in the 70’s? Aren’t we done with that already?
So if the problem really isn’t the sexualisation of children but the exposure of children, both male and female, to negative (read typical) portrayals of women and negative (read typical) heterorelational sex then where the hell do the researchers draw the line? Because most mothers aren’t just concerned about the scantily clad dolls that they are forced to buy for their daughters they are also concerned about having to walk past billboards depicting scantily clad young women, who are made up to look like young girls, and sucking lollipops. I’m sorry people but this is not a childhood issue this is a feminist issue and the culprit as always is male supremacy.
The frustrating thing is that this research has already been done, we already have the facts and figures of what happens when boys get brought up on a diet of objectified images of girls. FEMALE BODIED PEOPLES GET RAPED!!! Go figure. Why do we have to reinvent the wheel every 30 years? When even these stupid white men with letters after their name invent ‘corporate pedophilia’ and point out the obvious they get laughed out off the panel and get called out for moral panic. But women listen to the nice white men and get a name to call that feeling of disgust they get when they walk past a storefront displaying the latest deadened, objectified body of a woman. A name that nice white men don’t have the right to invent, a name that obscures and denies the reality of female subjugation. That feeling of disgust is our feminist rage. That feeling of disgust is our feminist right. That feeling of disgust is sometimes all that is left of our feminist Selves after a lifetime of being trapped in patriarchy with no language, no words, no framework to describe what it is like.
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