Today's girls are reluctant victims of an intensely sexual culture - right? Wrong, says one American sociologist who claims our moral panic is based on urban myths that bear no relation to reality for most teens
I'm the anxious father of a seven-year-old girl who is poised to join that scariest of demographics – girls aged between eight and 13. Just to read the titles of books targeted at the parents of these so-called tweenage girls is enough to send me into a conniption – The Lolita Effect, So Sexy So Soon, Girls Gone Skank, Where Has My Little Girl Gone?
They all peddle the same terrifying idea, namely that my daughter is at imminent risk of falling into promiscuity, neglecting her school work and could easily wind up working for tips as a pole dancer in a sleazy bar. My dream that she'll be professor of clever studies at Oxford before I retire looks destined to be unfulfilled.
My anxiety gets worse when I read that peek-a-boo pole-dancing kits are being targeted at young girls who are encouraged to earn money dancing sexually for their family. Can this be true? If you've ever paid your toddler to pole dance in a sexually provocative manner in your living room, please get in touch – so I can pass your details to the authorities.
Today, my daughter's main sartorial concern is to get hold of a huge beard and half-moon spectacles so she can go to school as Professor Dumbledore on World Book Day. Her heroines are Lyra Belacqua, Hermione Granger, Jo from Little Women, George from the Famous Five, Boudicca from Horrible Histories, Jessica Ennis and the TV physicist Dr Helen Czerski. Rihanna? Miley Cyrus? Not, thank heaven, yet.
But tomorrow? The fear is that she's on the road to ruin. "It's a drip, drip effect," argues Linda Papadopoulos, the psychologist commissioned by the Home Office in 2010 to write a review on the effects of sexualisation on young people. "It's seeped into the everyday: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes … We are hypersexualising young girls, telling them that their desirability rests on being desired. They want to please at any cost."
Then there is the internet, which seems to have been devised expressly to facilitate the transmission of porn and make boys think of girls as sub-human sex toys. Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph recently wrote about a friend's daughter who, when asked by her mother how she was enjoying her mixed-sex school, said: "You have to give the boys oral sex or they get cross … And you have to shave down there or the boys don't like it.'" The girl was 14 and the establishment in question was – this is where Telegraph readers whipped out the smelling salts – "a highly regarded boarding school".
Even boarding school boys are so degraded by online porn, argued Pearson, that they are driven to compel equally posh girls to sexualise themselves and perform sex acts against their will.
It's a brilliantly powerful cautionary tale that depicts girls as doomed and parents as clueless. "Mine is the first generation of parents that has to protect its young not just in the world we can see and hear, but in a parallel, online universe for which we barely know the password," she wrote.
No matter. "Mainstream media has made porn-inspired sex seem compulsory for girls at ever younger ages," suggested Pearson. Maybe at the Telegraph. At the Guardian, I don't remember an article making it seem that porn-inspired sex is compulsory for young girls.
In such a charged context, where not to panic about your daughter's apparently fast-disappearing childhood looks like a kind of neglect, who could fail to agree with David Cameron when he said before the 2010 election that he would, if elected, rid Britain of overly sexy clothes and toys for children, to ensure "our children get a childhood"? How could I not want to protect my daughter's innocence?
In her book Becoming Sexual, published next month, Danielle Egan, an American sociologist, questions the panic over the sexualisation of girls. She argues that it reflects adult disquiet rather than the reality for girls.
"The sexualised girl is a monster," says Egan, "the end point of defiled middle-class, heterosexual femininity; and for more traditional authors she also represents the erosion of the traditional family." But, for her, the monster is more apparent than real.
Certainly the figures she cites don't justify the panic. Egan points out that from 1998 to 2008, the teenage conception rate in the UK fell by 13.3% for under-18s and by 11.7% for under-16s. Similarly, while the median age for first intercourse has dropped in the last 30 years from 17 to 16, the frequency of intercourse among adolescent girls was very low, with 47% reporting they had taken part in no sexual acts, and 5.2% saying they had engaged in oral sex. Of teenage girls who had had sex, the majority (58%) had sex with someone they had already been going out with. If you want to make the (sexist, abusive) case that girls have "gone skank", then official statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles or the Family Planning Association won't help you.
But who needs statistics, when there are anecdotes? Significantly, what Pearson didn't report in her story was whether the girl in question had performed fellatio on her schoolmates. Again, no matter: better panic than find out, better to disempower girls rhetorically than suggest they might be forces for change in their own lives.
This is precisely the problem with this debate for Egan. Girls are depicted as victims rather than critically intelligent. "I'm not saying that pornography doesn't have an impact on boys and girls." Indeed she cites research that porn can foster contempt for women, and encourage boys to believe rape myths (eg "the girl was asking for it"). "What I am saying is that it's not true that all boys are like this or that all girls are destined to become their victims."
But, and this is Egan's more bracing point, neither are girls ever merely innocents who are – or should be – devoid of an erotic life. Egan recalls herself aged 13, hanging out with her friend Kristin – as they put on makeup, danced to Bananarama and Duran Duran and squeezed themselves into jeans using pliers and wire hangers. She wasn't putting on makeup and tight jeans for the sake of boys, but for her own pleasure.
That's not to say that those pleasures weren't sensual – the feel of denim on skin, dancing and the sticky sweetness of lipgloss were undeniably erotic, she argues. But Egan's recollection is distinguished by the pleasure her teenage self took in rebellion, play, curiosity and desire. Girls' sexuality is rarely written about like this. Rather, it's incessantly described as toxic, degraded and foul. In 2004, NBC and People magazine collaborated on a survey on the secret lives of teenage girls, and headlined it with the question: "Is oral sex the new goodnight kiss?" The answer was clearly "no" as the survey found that 10% of respondents aged 13-16 had engaged in oral sex. Similarly, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a report on "rainbow parties" at which girls would wear signature colours of lipgloss and then perform fellatio on a series of boys who would compare penises to see who could boast the greatest number of colours. The phenomenon proved to be an urban legend, but the panic was real.
If only some of the more chilling cases of the sexual abuse and degradation of girls and women nearer to home were merely urban legends. Last year, the Observer reported on how girls would submit to sexual abuse, including rape, in return for presumed status in south London gangs.
For an anxious father to imagine the lives of such girls and young women is to look into an abyss into which I can't allow my daughter to fall. But there are other abysses. Feminists such as Angela McRobbie suggest that a new post-feminist spectre is abroad – the girl who likes lap dances, exhibitionism and drinking like boys but retains enough femininity to retain her place in the dating market. I don't, to put it mildly, want my daughter to wind up like that.
It's hard to resist the temptation to extrapolate from such cases to a more general picture of what girls are doomed to in 21st-century Britain. "The debate about sexualisation often suggests girls are doomed to compulsive sex and pathologised femininity," says Egan. "But that's not the whole story by any means."
In any case, Egan has a different, more incendiary, story to tell. The sexualised girl, she argues, has replaced the fallen woman of Victorian literature as a figure of concern – and yet for Egan this says more about those expressing their concern rather than its object.
She argues that much rhetoric about girls' sexualisation is a distraction from deeper, more insoluble problems – such as economic despair. For her, white, middle-class, heterosexual society perceives itself to be at risk – from immigration, job insecurity, obliteration. "It's overwhelmingly white, middle-class, heterosexual girls who are portrayed as at risk in these stories of sexualised girls. I can't help but think this is more metaphor than reality."
So the sexualised girl is more an emblem of society's fears? "Exactly. We project on to girls all our insoluble anxieties. The idea is there is so much in our society that we can't fix. More manageable is protecting young girls from being sexualised, so we do that."
Is she saying the sexualisation of girls is a fantasy dreamed up by a cabal of conservative columnists, deluded feminists and politicians? "Not at all. Corporations rely upon and reproduce sexist, racist and homophobic images of young people to sell products and create brand loyalty. Sexist exploitation is real. Sexual violence is real. But to portray girls as only victims suffering from false consciousness and therefore as trapped in a sexualised culture that they can't change is a mistake."
This thought is at least appealing to an anxious father. But it doesn't allay the anxiety completely. How could anything? When, for example, Diane Abbott says that we're living in a "pornified culture" that she claims has brought about a "striptease culture in British schools and society" it's hard for me not to feel that the next few years of parenthood will be more than a little bracing. Reported by guardian.co.uk 16 hours ago.
I'm the anxious father of a seven-year-old girl who is poised to join that scariest of demographics – girls aged between eight and 13. Just to read the titles of books targeted at the parents of these so-called tweenage girls is enough to send me into a conniption – The Lolita Effect, So Sexy So Soon, Girls Gone Skank, Where Has My Little Girl Gone?
They all peddle the same terrifying idea, namely that my daughter is at imminent risk of falling into promiscuity, neglecting her school work and could easily wind up working for tips as a pole dancer in a sleazy bar. My dream that she'll be professor of clever studies at Oxford before I retire looks destined to be unfulfilled.
My anxiety gets worse when I read that peek-a-boo pole-dancing kits are being targeted at young girls who are encouraged to earn money dancing sexually for their family. Can this be true? If you've ever paid your toddler to pole dance in a sexually provocative manner in your living room, please get in touch – so I can pass your details to the authorities.
Today, my daughter's main sartorial concern is to get hold of a huge beard and half-moon spectacles so she can go to school as Professor Dumbledore on World Book Day. Her heroines are Lyra Belacqua, Hermione Granger, Jo from Little Women, George from the Famous Five, Boudicca from Horrible Histories, Jessica Ennis and the TV physicist Dr Helen Czerski. Rihanna? Miley Cyrus? Not, thank heaven, yet.
But tomorrow? The fear is that she's on the road to ruin. "It's a drip, drip effect," argues Linda Papadopoulos, the psychologist commissioned by the Home Office in 2010 to write a review on the effects of sexualisation on young people. "It's seeped into the everyday: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes … We are hypersexualising young girls, telling them that their desirability rests on being desired. They want to please at any cost."
Then there is the internet, which seems to have been devised expressly to facilitate the transmission of porn and make boys think of girls as sub-human sex toys. Allison Pearson of the Daily Telegraph recently wrote about a friend's daughter who, when asked by her mother how she was enjoying her mixed-sex school, said: "You have to give the boys oral sex or they get cross … And you have to shave down there or the boys don't like it.'" The girl was 14 and the establishment in question was – this is where Telegraph readers whipped out the smelling salts – "a highly regarded boarding school".
Even boarding school boys are so degraded by online porn, argued Pearson, that they are driven to compel equally posh girls to sexualise themselves and perform sex acts against their will.
It's a brilliantly powerful cautionary tale that depicts girls as doomed and parents as clueless. "Mine is the first generation of parents that has to protect its young not just in the world we can see and hear, but in a parallel, online universe for which we barely know the password," she wrote.
No matter. "Mainstream media has made porn-inspired sex seem compulsory for girls at ever younger ages," suggested Pearson. Maybe at the Telegraph. At the Guardian, I don't remember an article making it seem that porn-inspired sex is compulsory for young girls.
In such a charged context, where not to panic about your daughter's apparently fast-disappearing childhood looks like a kind of neglect, who could fail to agree with David Cameron when he said before the 2010 election that he would, if elected, rid Britain of overly sexy clothes and toys for children, to ensure "our children get a childhood"? How could I not want to protect my daughter's innocence?
In her book Becoming Sexual, published next month, Danielle Egan, an American sociologist, questions the panic over the sexualisation of girls. She argues that it reflects adult disquiet rather than the reality for girls.
"The sexualised girl is a monster," says Egan, "the end point of defiled middle-class, heterosexual femininity; and for more traditional authors she also represents the erosion of the traditional family." But, for her, the monster is more apparent than real.
Certainly the figures she cites don't justify the panic. Egan points out that from 1998 to 2008, the teenage conception rate in the UK fell by 13.3% for under-18s and by 11.7% for under-16s. Similarly, while the median age for first intercourse has dropped in the last 30 years from 17 to 16, the frequency of intercourse among adolescent girls was very low, with 47% reporting they had taken part in no sexual acts, and 5.2% saying they had engaged in oral sex. Of teenage girls who had had sex, the majority (58%) had sex with someone they had already been going out with. If you want to make the (sexist, abusive) case that girls have "gone skank", then official statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles or the Family Planning Association won't help you.
But who needs statistics, when there are anecdotes? Significantly, what Pearson didn't report in her story was whether the girl in question had performed fellatio on her schoolmates. Again, no matter: better panic than find out, better to disempower girls rhetorically than suggest they might be forces for change in their own lives.
This is precisely the problem with this debate for Egan. Girls are depicted as victims rather than critically intelligent. "I'm not saying that pornography doesn't have an impact on boys and girls." Indeed she cites research that porn can foster contempt for women, and encourage boys to believe rape myths (eg "the girl was asking for it"). "What I am saying is that it's not true that all boys are like this or that all girls are destined to become their victims."
But, and this is Egan's more bracing point, neither are girls ever merely innocents who are – or should be – devoid of an erotic life. Egan recalls herself aged 13, hanging out with her friend Kristin – as they put on makeup, danced to Bananarama and Duran Duran and squeezed themselves into jeans using pliers and wire hangers. She wasn't putting on makeup and tight jeans for the sake of boys, but for her own pleasure.
That's not to say that those pleasures weren't sensual – the feel of denim on skin, dancing and the sticky sweetness of lipgloss were undeniably erotic, she argues. But Egan's recollection is distinguished by the pleasure her teenage self took in rebellion, play, curiosity and desire. Girls' sexuality is rarely written about like this. Rather, it's incessantly described as toxic, degraded and foul. In 2004, NBC and People magazine collaborated on a survey on the secret lives of teenage girls, and headlined it with the question: "Is oral sex the new goodnight kiss?" The answer was clearly "no" as the survey found that 10% of respondents aged 13-16 had engaged in oral sex. Similarly, the Oprah Winfrey Show had a report on "rainbow parties" at which girls would wear signature colours of lipgloss and then perform fellatio on a series of boys who would compare penises to see who could boast the greatest number of colours. The phenomenon proved to be an urban legend, but the panic was real.
If only some of the more chilling cases of the sexual abuse and degradation of girls and women nearer to home were merely urban legends. Last year, the Observer reported on how girls would submit to sexual abuse, including rape, in return for presumed status in south London gangs.
For an anxious father to imagine the lives of such girls and young women is to look into an abyss into which I can't allow my daughter to fall. But there are other abysses. Feminists such as Angela McRobbie suggest that a new post-feminist spectre is abroad – the girl who likes lap dances, exhibitionism and drinking like boys but retains enough femininity to retain her place in the dating market. I don't, to put it mildly, want my daughter to wind up like that.
It's hard to resist the temptation to extrapolate from such cases to a more general picture of what girls are doomed to in 21st-century Britain. "The debate about sexualisation often suggests girls are doomed to compulsive sex and pathologised femininity," says Egan. "But that's not the whole story by any means."
In any case, Egan has a different, more incendiary, story to tell. The sexualised girl, she argues, has replaced the fallen woman of Victorian literature as a figure of concern – and yet for Egan this says more about those expressing their concern rather than its object.
She argues that much rhetoric about girls' sexualisation is a distraction from deeper, more insoluble problems – such as economic despair. For her, white, middle-class, heterosexual society perceives itself to be at risk – from immigration, job insecurity, obliteration. "It's overwhelmingly white, middle-class, heterosexual girls who are portrayed as at risk in these stories of sexualised girls. I can't help but think this is more metaphor than reality."
So the sexualised girl is more an emblem of society's fears? "Exactly. We project on to girls all our insoluble anxieties. The idea is there is so much in our society that we can't fix. More manageable is protecting young girls from being sexualised, so we do that."
Is she saying the sexualisation of girls is a fantasy dreamed up by a cabal of conservative columnists, deluded feminists and politicians? "Not at all. Corporations rely upon and reproduce sexist, racist and homophobic images of young people to sell products and create brand loyalty. Sexist exploitation is real. Sexual violence is real. But to portray girls as only victims suffering from false consciousness and therefore as trapped in a sexualised culture that they can't change is a mistake."
This thought is at least appealing to an anxious father. But it doesn't allay the anxiety completely. How could anything? When, for example, Diane Abbott says that we're living in a "pornified culture" that she claims has brought about a "striptease culture in British schools and society" it's hard for me not to feel that the next few years of parenthood will be more than a little bracing. Reported by guardian.co.uk 16 hours ago.