Alexandra O’Dell, a student at North Idaho College, does a great job of integrating data, interviews, and images in this 11-minute video about the sexualization of young girls in the media:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Eight readers — Christine B., Hermes, Yvette, Hope H., Tyler D., Pris S., John G., and Dmitrity T.M. — alerted us to a photo spread in the December issue of French Vogue. The series of photographs is another piece of evidence of the adultification of young girls, an adultification that looks suspiciously like child porn, given the sexualization of adult women. New York Magazine reports that the girls are 6 years old. Don’t miss the lipstick, high heels, and disinterested pouts.
The thing is: the adultification/sexualization of young girls is paralleled by a infantilization of adult women. This adds up to a conflation of women and children which serves to uphold prejudice against adult women and the exploitation of girls.
More at Gawker.
For more on the infantilization of adult women, see our posts on lady spanking, Glee, this collection of examples, a vintage example, and the Halloween edition.
For more on the adultification/sexualization of young girls, see our posts on sexually suggestive teen brands, adultifying children of color, “trucker girl” baby booties, “future trophy wife” kids’ tee, House of Dereón’s girls’ collection, “is modesty making a comeback?“, more sexualized clothes and toys, sexist kids’ tees, a trifecta of sexualizing girls, a zebra-striped string bikini for infants, a nipple tassle t-shirt, even more icky kids’ t-shirts, “are you tighter than a 5th grader?” t-shirt, the totally gross “I’m tight like spandex” girls’ t-shirt, a Halloween costume post, and girls in the World of Dance tour.
And, yes, it happens to boys too. For examples of the sexualization of young boys, see our posts on Lil’ Wayne’s virginity loss, the depiction of a 13-year-old boy having a relationship with his teacher, the sexy marketing of both Jaden Smith and Justin Bieber, with a follow up here.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Sharon Gefen sent along a five-minute SPARK Summit video on the sexualization of women and girls in the media and its effects on young women:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Found here, here, and here thanks to Erin H. Thanks!
Erin writes:
This brings together the awful hypersexualisation of toys for young girls (recommended: ages 4 – 8 ) with the often bizarre and sometimes disturbing anthropomorphisation of animals. In this case, Bratz dolls (complete with impossible footwear and freakishly large eyes) meet My Little Ponies in an unholy combination of hinted-at cleavage, age-inappropriate costuming / accessories and come-hither glances! So many shades of ick. What would the equivalent for young boys be, I wonder?
Speaking of, is anyone else nostalgic for my little ponies and carebears? Sigh.
NEW! In a similar phenomenon, I present you the Tini Puppini (found here via Jezebel):
Like a lot of moms, I faced the Barbie dilemma when my daughter was younger. Ultimately I figured a little bit of Barbie would sate her appetite (and stop the nagging) without doing too much harm. Like a vaccination, or homeopathic inoculation against the Big Bad. I told myself my daughter didn’t use her dolls for fashion play anyway: her Barbie “funeral,” for instance, was a tour de force of childhood imagination. I told myself I only got her “good” Barbies: ethnic Barbies, Wonder Woman Barbie, Cleopatra Barbie. Now that she’s 10 and long ago gave the dolls away (or “mummified” them and buried them in the back yard in a “time capsule”), I can’t say whether they’ll have any latent impact on her body image or self-perception. It would seem ludicrous, at any rate, to try to pinpoint the impact of one toy.
But now, according to a study published this week, it turns out that playing with Barbie, even career Barbie, may indeed limit girls’ perception of their own future choices. Psychologists randomly assigned girls ages 4-7 to play with one of three dolls. Two were Barbies: a fashion Barbie (in a dress and high heels); and a “career” Barbie with a doctor’s coat and stethoscope. (NOTE: I just pulled these images from the web: I don’t know which actual Barbies they used.)
The third, “control” doll was a Mrs. Potato Head, who, although she comes with fashion accessories such as a purse and shoes, doesn’t have Barbie’s sexualized (and totally unrealistic) curves.
So, after just a few minutes of play, the girls were asked if they could do any of 10 occupations when they grew up. They were also asked if boys could do those jobs. Half of the careers, according to the authors, were male-dominated and half were female dominated. The results:
Girls who played with Barbie thought they could do fewer jobs than boys could do. But girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head reported nearly the same number of possible careers for themselves and for boys.
More to the point:
There was no difference in results between girls who played with a Barbie wearing a dress and the career-focused, doctor version of the doll.
Obviously, the study is not definitive. Obviously, one doll isn’t going to make the critical difference in a young woman’s life blah blah blah. Still, it’s interesting that it doesn’t matter whether the girls played with fashion Barbie or doctor Barbie, the doll had the same effect and in only a few minutes.
That reminded me of a study in which college women enrolled in an advanced calculus class were asked to watch a series of four, 30-second TV commercials. The first group watched four netural ads. The second group watched two neutral ads and two depicting stereotypes about women (a girl enraptured by acne medicine; a woman drooling over a brownie mix). Afterward they completed a survey and—bing!—the group who’d seen the stereo- typed ads expressed less interest in math- and science-related careers than classmates who had watched only the neutral ones. Let me repeat: the effect was demonstrable after watching two ads.
And guess who performed better on a math test, coeds who took it after being asked to try on a bathing suit or those who had been asked to try on a sweater? (Hint: the latter group; interestingly, male students showed no such disparity.)
Now think about the culture girls are exposed to over and over and over and over and over, whether in toys or movies or tv or music videos, in which regardless of what else you are—smart, athletic, kind, even feminist, even old—you must be “hot.” Perhaps, then, the issue is not “well, one doll can’t have that much of an impact,” so much as “if playing with one doll for a few minutes has that much impact what is the effect of the tsunami of sexualization that girls confront every day, year after year?”
Peggy Orenstein is the author of four books, including The New York Times best-seller Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. You can follow her at her blog, where this post originally appeared, on facebook, and on twitter.
Thanks to YetAnotherGirl and Kari B., we can now feast our eyes on this ad from Unik (“unique”) Wax Center. It’s a promotion offering 50% off hair waxing for girls “15 and younger.” The Consumerist reports that all procedures are fair game, including bikini waxes.
The usual concerns regarding the sexualization of young girls apply here. Why do girls this young need to be concerned about how they look in bikinis?
Perhaps more interesting is the frame for why such a girl might want to undergo waxing. According to the 4th of July-themed ad, it’s to “celebrate freedom and independence.” Implicitly, hers. So, to follow the logic to its endpoint, a girl of 15 or younger can’t feel free unless she’s hairless.
The company, responding to criticism, gave arguments along these lines. They framed waxing as a “regular activity” and a “process in life” that “goes along with our country.” Moms are coming in to get waxed (as all women do), explained the corporate offices, they’re dragging their tweens along with them (obviously), and the girls “have questions” and “get bored,” so the next step is to initiate them into the ritual.
So, the whole process is “natural,” as the ad copy specifies. It is just an inevitable step in a supposedly universal way of (female) life. And one that liberates women from… um, I don’t know what… embarrassment, I guess.
The ad is reminiscent of many similar campaigns aimed at adult women, ones that frame consumption of clothes, make-up, jewelry, and cosmetic procedures as expression of freedoms. In this way, it’s a capitalist appropriation of feminism/liberation ideology. It’s also a naturalization of what is, in reality, a lifetime of compulsory, expensive, and sometimes harmful beauty practices.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.
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You often hear that everything is sexualized nowadays, and not just women but men too. In the September 2011 issue of Sexuality & Culture, we examine this idea in an analysis of Rolling Stone magazine covers. Specifically, we wanted to know if men and women are equally sexualized, and if they have become either more frequently or more intensely sexualized over time. To do this, we analyzed every cover from the first issue of Rolling Stone in November 1967 through 2009, minus a few (such as those that featured cartoons rather than people, etc.). You can read more about our methods in the article here.
In order to analyze these 1000+ images of men and women, we developed a “scale of sexualization.” This scale was composed of 11 different variables to measure different aspects of sexualization. For instance, a cover model was given “points” for being sexualized if their lips were parted, if they were scantily clad (more points if they were naked), if the text describing them used explicitly sexual language, or if they were lying down on a bed or otherwise posed in a sexually suggestive way. Images could score anywhere from 0 points (and 176 did) to 23 points (though 20 was our highest score).
Once all of the images on all 43 years of Rolling Stone were scored, we divided the images into three groups: those images that were generally not sexualized, those images that were sexualized, and those images that were so sexualized that we dubbed them “hypersexualized.”
The graph below shows our findings:
Looking first at images of men (represented by dotted lines), we see that the majority of them– from 89% in the 1960s to 83% in the 2000s — were nonsexualized. Men are sometimes shown in a sexualized manner (about 15% in the 2000s), but they are rarely hypersexualized (just 2% in the 2000s). In fact, only 2% of the images of men across the entire dataset — all 43 years — are hypersexualized.
But, again, the vast majority of men — some 83% in recent years — were not sexualized at all. So, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone in the 2000s, you would most likely see men portrayed in a non-sexualized manner, such as in these images:
In contrast, women, especially recently, are almost always sexualized to some degree. In fact, by the 2000s, 61% of women were hypersexualized, and another 22% were sexualized. This means that, in the 2000s, women were 3 1/2 times more likely to be hypersexualized than nonsexualized, and nearly five times more likely to be sexualized to any degree (sexualized or hypersexualized) than nonsexualized.
So, in the last decade, if you were to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone that featured a woman on its cover, you would most likely see her portrayed in a sexualized manner, since fully 83% of women were either sexualized or hypersexualized in the 2000s. Here are a few examples of hypersexualized images:
In our article, we argue that the dramatic increase in hypersexualized images of women — along with the corresponding decline in nonsexualized images of them — indicates a decisive narrowing or homogenization of media representations of women. In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, journalist Ariel Levy (2005:5) describes this trend in this way: “A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression,” Levy writes, “we now view as sexuality” (emphases in original). In this article, we offer empirical evidence for this claim.
So what explains this trend towards women’s hypersexualization? We don’t think it’s just the idea that “sex sells.” If that were true, we’d see many more images of women on Rolling Stone’s covers (only 30% of covers feature images of women) and we’d also see more sexualized and hypersexualized images of men. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Mary Nell Trautner and Erin Hatton are Assistant Professors of Sociology at SUNY Buffalo. Trautner is the author of many articles on the relationship between law, culture, organizational practices, and social inequality (and has written a fantastic Soc Images Course Guide for Sociology of Gender courses). Hatton, a sociologist of work, is the author of The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America.
Last week I posted photos of the Justin Bieber/Kim Kardashian photoshoot for Elle. I compared it to my earlier post on the sexualization of Jaden Smith. In both I argued that we accept the sexualization of boys at younger ages than girls, seeing it as adorable and proof that they are sufficiently heterosexual and masculine rather than that they are in danger of sexual exploitation.
Yesterday Rob W. sent in a photo that I think illustrates this point well:
Who is the adult woman wearing this shirt? That’s Karissa Shannon, who is dating Hugh Hefner.
Imagine, if you can, if this were an adult man associated in some way with a famous producer of pornography widely known for dating groups of much younger women, and that adult man’s shirt had this same message but about two teen/pre-teen girls (or, for that matter, imagine a famous gay man wearing this exact shirt). And then imagine the concern and horror that would ensue, the apologies through the man’s agent, and so on.
A short google search did turn up a post (re-posted in several other places) calling the shirt inappropriate, but given that Shannon is referred to as “sloppy seconds” in it, I’m not sure how to take it (since “sloppy seconds” reaffirms a sexual double-standard itself). A lot of other sites, on the other hand, found it adorable and/or funny, and asked readers to weigh in on Team Justin vs. Team Jaden.
