The Pornification of Girlhood

IN HER BOOK The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1998), Joan Jacobs Brumberg examines the diaries of girls from the 1800s to the present. Extracts from two journals illustrate the significant shifts in the way girls see themselves and what they consider important. In 1882 a girl wrote:

Resolved, not to talk about myself or
feelings.To think before speaking. To
work
seriously. To be self restrained in
conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts
wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in
others.

A century later, another girl writes in her diary:

I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly
can with the help of my budget and baby
sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses,
already got new hair cut, good makeup, new clothes
and accessories.

The adolescent female body is, observes Brumberg, a “template for much of the social change of the twentieth century”.

I am not lauding the 1800s as a paradise for women. Nor do I think any girl should be silent about herself or her feelings. What is disturbing, however, are the constraints under which girls struggle to develop and flourish today. Many girls now seem to value their physical appearance more highly than personal achievement. They’ve been led to believe their bodies are the most valuable thing that they have to offer the world. How has it come to this?

Trends in popular culture, the insidious creep of the cult of bodily perfection, the dominance of fad diets, billboards and magazines depicting flawless female forms, all play a part. Then there’s the commercial interests of companies marketing the promise of success in life through the bowling-ball breasts preferred by readers of Zoo.

Another significant factor is that the movement for women’s equality was overtaken by the movement for sexual licence—the sexual revolution. To be free has come to mean the freedom to wrap your legs around a pole, flash your breasts in public, girls-gone-wild style, or perform acts of the oral variety on schoolboys at weekend parties in lieu of the (as traditionally understood) goodnight kiss.

IN AN AGE of “Girl Power”, many girls are feeling powerless. They are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological wellbeing at risk in ways never before imagined. To quote Brumberg, “More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne the brunt of twentieth-century social change, and we ignore that fact at our peril.” Part of that social change is the wallpapering of society with sexual imagery:

We have backed off from traditional supervision or
guidance of adolescent girls; yet we sustain a
popular culture that is permeated by sexual imagery,
so much so that many young women regard their
bodies and sexual allure as [their] primary currency.

This puts girls at risk. “Many young women … do not have the emotional resources to be truly autonomous or to withstand outside pressures from peers and boyfriends, whom they desperately want to please.” Psychologist and therapist Mary Pipher shares Brumberg’s concerns. In Reviving Ophelia (1994), she writes:

girls are having more trouble now than they had
thirty years ago … Girls today are much more
oppressed. They are coming of age in a more
dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture
… as they navigate a more dangerous world, girls
are less protected.

Girls are endangered by those with a keen desire to break down taboos that previously helped keep them out of harm’s way. The American Psychological Association (APA) quotes D.L. Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (2002):

in the current environment, teen girls are
encouraged to look sexy, yet they know little about
what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires,
and to make rational and responsible decisions
about pleasure and risk within intimate
relationships that acknowledge their own desires.
Younger girls imbued with adult sexuality may
seem sexually appealing, and this may suggest their
sexual availability and status as appropriate
sexual
objects.

Girls are “being invited to see themselves not as healthy, active and imaginative girls, but as hot and sassy tweens on the prowl”, write Andrea Nauze and Emma Rush in Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia (2006). Fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus of Hannah Montana fame was simply following the script expected of her as a celebrity adolescent when she posed, topless and half-wrapped in a silky sheet, for Vanity Fair, with post-coital bed hair and ruby lips.

THE PRESSURE to conform to an idealised body type in a sex-saturated culture that values girls who are thin, sexy and “bad” is taking a massive toll. Despite the many opportunities available to them, girls today are struggling. Courtney E. Martin observes in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007) that self-hatred has become a rite of passage for teenage girls, pointing to “the frightening new normalcy of hating your body”. These girls may be good at lots of things. But that doesn’t really matter if their bodies are not like the images of thin airbrushed celebrities and models who are in their faces every day. Life seems to have become one big beauty pageant.

The body has become a project that a girl has to work on full-time. If she stops to even take a breath, she might gain weight. Too many girls are trying to imitate half-starved celebrities, and are obsessed with trying to conform to impossible-to-attain highly sexualised images. Some sobering statistics:

• A Mission Australia national survey (2007) of 29,000 young people aged eleven to twenty-four found that body image was the most important problem for them—ahead of family conflict, stress, bullying, alcohol, drugs and suicide.

• The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health found that between 40 per cent and 82 per cent of young women were dissatisfied with their weight and/or shape.

• Close to 20 per cent of adolescent girls use fasting for two or more days to lose weight. Another 13 per cent use vomiting. Others rely on slimming pills, chewing but not swallowing food, smoking and laxative abuse, as found in the 2006 National Youth Cultures of Eating Study.

• One in 100 adolescent girls suffers anorexia.

• An estimated one in five is bulimic.

• One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, according to reports in August last year.

Body Image Dissatisfaction (BID) is associated with emotional distress, obsessive thinking about appearance, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, depression, poor self-esteem, smoking and poor eating practices.

Some magazines for young girls claim they want to address the limited range of bodies shown in their magazines. For example, Girlfriend has what it calls a positive body image policy. Yet the Girlfriend editors also admit to digitally enhancing the women in its pages— including their own staff—with Photoshop.

Girlfriend says it wants to cater for women who are above a size 8, so it includes “large” women such as Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé Knowles and Jessica Simpson. Well, that’s going to make average women everywhere feel better. Women with one or two curves and without a scarecrow profile are permitted coverage, provided they are extremely famous and beautiful—and not too “large”.

THE 2007 REPORT of the APA taskforce on the sexualisation of girls links the objectifying and sexualising of girls and young women with three of the most common mental health problems suffered by them: eating disorders, low selfesteem, and depression. Yet objectification is reinforced through embedded sexual content everywhere you look. According to the APA, “A culture can be infused with sexualised representations of girls and women, suggesting that such sexualisation is good and normal.” This leads to girls and women feeling bad about themselves:

there is evidence that sexualisation contributed to
impaired cognitive performance in college-aged
women, and related research suggests that viewing
material that is sexually objectifying can contribute
to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self
esteem, depressive affect, and even physical health
problems in high-school-aged girls and in young
women.

In addition to leading to feelings of shame
and anxiety, sexualizing treatment and self
objectification can generate feelings of disgust
toward one’s physical self. Girls may feel they
are “ugly” and “gross” or untouchable …

The clearest evidence of pornography’s insidious take-over of the public space is billboards containing highly sexualised images of women and other forms of sexual messaging. Most complaints are dismissed by the Advertising Standards Board, which patronisingly implies that complainants are simply hung up about discussing sex with their children. The membership of the Board includes Catharine Lumby, who defends Hustler’s creator Larry Flynt as simply “bad taste”. Lumby has also provided evidence in support of Adultshop’s case for the loosening of restrictions on Xrated films.

Pin-ups in the office or workplace have been found in various cases in Australia to constitute sexual harassment. Why is it then that giant pin-ups in the public space do not? Dr Lauren Rosewarne asks this question in her 2008 book Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy. Dr Rosewarne highlights how the signs and symbols of pornography are now enmeshed in popular culture:

While pin-up images are prohibited in a workplace,
outdoor advertisements, which may contain
references to pornography, are freely displayed …
pornography can be interpreted as being one of the
most potent contemporary influences on advertising …
such advertisements are helping normalise
pornographic images by displaying them in places
where they are unavoidable and thus encouraging
the acceptance of them. This process is known as
mainstreaming … explicit sexual expression has
become naturalised.

So complete is the migration of images from porn into everyday advertising that an ad for hamburger company Bite Me features a woman in red bustier, her mouth perfectly rounded and amazed like a sex-doll, with meat spilling everywhere and tomato sauce splotched above her breast, all reminiscent of the classic porn “money shot”.

The Brisbane Times, after publishing an article titled “Beauties brave brazilian wax” in June last year, asked readers which they preferred, “bald” or “au naturel”? It gave lots of men the opportunity to rhapsodise about why they liked to have a “good perv” and didn’t like hair caught in their teeth.

Not long ago the Age embedded on its home page a video clip of a porn industry award show in the USA, with writhing porn stars grinding away, easily accessible for anyone visiting the Age online for a school project. The Age Life&Style blog “Ask Sam” ran a story, “Is porn making men too picky” in April 2008. It attracted forty pages of posts, most from porn devotees, including one man who declared, “porn is fantastic … hardcore is the way to go”.

This stuff is rife on television too. SBS screened the British documentary “Obscene Machines” in June 2005, repeated in April 2007. This film depicted women being penetrated by giant mechanical dildos with names like The Monster, The Intruder, The Probe, The Snake and The Trespasser. It also featured an older man showing us how he had sex with a life-size sex doll called Emma. Emma is wearing school uniform.

It was rated M15+. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found in February this year (almost a year after the film was screened the second time—it got away with it the first time) that it breached the code of practice. There were no penalties, no fines. SBS must have been trembling when it received ACMA’s letter.

It is often said that young people have to go “searching” for porn. More often now, it seems that the porn is searching for them, so ubiquitous and commonplace has it become.

WHAT WAS ONCE considered unthinkable is now ordinary. Children are no longer out of bounds for anything. Here are some examples, by no means an exhaustive list:

• A British web search company, Jellydeal, introduces the latest trends in little girls’ underwear: “Gone are the days of voluminous, bulky and cumbersome underwear meant to be worn under layers of clothing. These days underwear has become briefer, bolder and more stylish. There is even underwear to complement different moods you wish to portray: frisky, seductive or mysteriously alluring.”

• The children’s wear sections of department stores sell “Bralettes”, padded, decorative bras and g-strings featuring cherries and the words “eye candy” and “wink wink”. • Merry slogans on Christmas undies for children in a Hobart store include “Try Jingle These” and “Unwrap Me”.

• Slogans on children’s T-shirts include “Breast Fed Baby: Stick around for the show”, “All daddy wanted was a blow job”, “All mummy wanted was a backrub”, “Hung like a five year old”, “F!# the milk, where’s the whiskey tits”, “I enjoy a good spanking”, “I’m too sexy for my diaper”.

• T-shirts for girls imprinted “Porn Star”, “Hotter Down Under”, “My Name Sounds Better Screamed”, “I wanna do you now”, “Miss Wasted”, “Drink until he’s cute”.

• Ads for downloadable mobile phone wallpaper in teen magazines include “Save a virgin, do me instead”, “Sex—when it’s good it’s bad, when it’s bad it’s still good”, “Instant slut—just add alcohol”.

• The Playboy makeup line sold in Priceline includes “Tie me to the bedpost blush” and “Miss 12 Playboy lip gloss”. There are also Playboy doona covers and Playboy pencil cases. Girls are wearing the brand of the global sex industry, directed by an eightyyear- old man in pyjamas, and they think it’s about cute rabbits. • The “Peek-aboo” pole dancing kit was marketed online for children through a British toy company. With it came a “sexy” garter belt and a DVD “demonstrating suggestive dance moves”. Its users could “Unleash the sex kitten inside” and flaunt it to the world. There are also pole “fitness” classes for children in Sydney. • Girlfriend informs readers that a dancing pole is, like, a really good present to give a girl. In fact, it’s “The #1 item on every girl’s wish list. She gets fit … you get to watch”. The number one item on a girl’s wish list? That must have been a massive survey.

• Become the world’s hottest Bimbo—that’s the aim of the online MissBimbo.com game being played by little girls around the world. Girls advance in the game by losing weight, having makeovers, including breast enhancement, and picking up boys in the Bimbo club.

• What’s New, the “official home of the Beanie Baby”, also sells sex toys including blow-up dolls, including a G.I.L.F. (you may not have heard about the M.I.L.F phenomenon, which stands for Mum I’d Like to F***. Substitute the word grandma and you get the idea). And she’s not in the shop to look after the Beanie Babies. (If you want to see how vile the G.I.L.F. sex doll is, go to Julie Gale’s Kids Free 2B Kids submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts Inquiry into the sexualisation of children in the contemporary media environment: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/ eca_ctte/sexualisation_of_children/submissions/sublist. htm.)

• Bratz dolls in sexualised clothing, miniskirts, fishnet stockings and feather boas look like they should come with a pimp. “All nine Bratz Babyz