Tag Archives: sexualisation

Leave them kids alone: On sexualisation

A shorter version of this post is available on Liberal Conspiracy

My four year old sister has a pink pair of plastic high heeled shoes. They are not the type of too-big heels that little girls tottered about in years gone by. They fit her little feet perfectly, and she clops about the house in them. She also has a red scooter that she rides along the street, picking up and collecting the elastic bands that postmen drop on their rounds. I ask her why she does these things (wears the heels, collects the bands). Her answer was the same for both. It’s fun. When my sister wears her pink high heels she isn’t vying for the attention of men or boys. She isn’t sexualising herself. Yet when I first saw her teetering about the house in these heels I panicked.  In my grown up mind, a high heel is a shoe designed to make the leg look elongated and sexually appealing. My instinctive protectiveness towards my sister made me want to snatch away the shoes, to dispose of them, to have her running around in trainers again. I didn’t want anyone looking at my sister like a sex object. But upon more thought, I came to the conclusion that the only person sexualising her was me. By assuming she thinks the same about high heels as my adult brain does, I was thinking of her as a being with a comprehensive understanding of sexual consciousness. She isn’t.

At a recent friend’s family get-together, music was playing, and one six year old got into the spirit by imitating the dance moves she had no doubt seen on TV. She was quickly reprimanded by a fellow party goer who told her not to dance like that, ‘because little girls who dance that way grow up to be whores’. She didn’t understand why she was being told off, and started to cry.

And yesterday on Question Time, Germaine Greer saw fit to brand little girls in sequined Jordan-pink jeans ‘tarts’.

Over the past week, lots of concerned adults have seen fit to speak on behalf of children, caught up in the grasping fear that they are all being sexualised beyond anyone’s control. Amidst all of the arm flailing, hand wringing concerns over the sexualisation of children, there has been some blind confusion about exactly who or what is sexualising them.  Reg Bailey, author of the Department for Education’s review into the issue entitled ‘Letting Children be Children‘, is baffled. In his analysis of this increasingly sexualised society, he finds it hard to pin down any cause, admitting ‘it is far from clear how we arrived at this point’.

Predictably, his much anticipated report was ultimately meaningless, based on emotional unease instead of quantifiable evidence, without even a distinct definition of sexualisation in the first place.  It’s almost depressingly comical to watch commentators and journalists alike repeatedly stumble over and miss the root of this dilemma.

The perspective of this sexualisation is almost philosophical. Many news reports cite worried parents lamenting the loss of their children’s innocence, but I think it’s worth asking- lost innocence in who’s eyes?

Children are not sexualising themselves. Adults are sexualising them by projecting adult morality on to them. More often than not, that adult sexual morality is entrenched in sexist ideals. The sexist ideals floated to the surface when that six year old girl was warned she would grow up into a whore if she continued to dance provocatively. Sexist ideals dictate to us that the way a woman or girl dances must reflect how much sex she has had, or wants. Sexism tells us that women don’t just dance for dancing’s sake- like every other female action and endeavour; it’s orchestrated for the benefit of men. Because after all, isn’t that why we function?

What happens when you project your patriarchal adult moral ideals on to pre-pubescent bodies? The judging starts.  Suddenly little girls are called whores, tarts, sluts.

This sexualisation doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and is indicative of the wider problem of objectification of women’s bodies.  Is it any wonder that these toxic gender roles are filtering down to kids?

They imitate their idols and we shame and punish them for it. The female idols in question are often regarded with disgust for balancing on the knife edge between daring to announce publicly that they have sexual feelings, and exploiting their sexual imagery. Morality crusaders are quick to let us know that sex is all around us, and that sex sells. But that’s a lie. It’s not sex all around us, but the objectification and consequent marginalisation of women’s bodies, commodified into accessory status. But for some strange reason, nobody wants to talk about that. It’s too much of a stretch of the imagination to challenge patriarchy. It’s easier to wail about this sexualisation of our children, all the while colluding in the myth that all of these sexualising factors are immediately permissible once the girl in question turns eighteen.

Regulation and legislation will not fix this. Equality will. Free women from these narrow, suffocating gender-fascist ideals of appearance and behaviour, and the girls will follow.

Why sex and relationships education should be compulsory

Last week, Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP for Peterborough, embarrassed himself in an ill informed twitter rant against the importance of sex education. Jackson was responding to the Health Protection Agency’s regional statistics on sexually transmitted infections, and the news that Peterborough has the fourth highest rate of STIs in eastern England. ‘Very disappointing news on STI rates in Peterborough’ He tweeted. ‘No doubt our liberal friends will tell us we need more sex education- as it’s worked so well!’ In response to complaints, Jackson tweeted “Sex education memo to sad tedious sex obsessed Leftie weirdos – you’re confusing me with someone who’s interested.” Later, he told Peterborough’s Evening Telegraph “I wanted to engage in intelligent debate but was met with a barrage of crude, personal abuse”.

Interesting contradiction- for a man whose blame culture views suggest an intolerance of young people, his insults are more than a little childish.Here’s hoping Stewart Jackson remembers what it’s like to be a teenager, because if he does, perhaps he would credit young people with an ounce of intelligence.
Jackson’s oversimplification of the issue is telling in itself. Ask any young person and they’ll probably confirm that sex education isn’t reaching children in time. We need more information, and we need distributed earlier. Sex and relationships education, covering both biological and social aspects of sexual activity, is an issue that needs to be addressed with ever increasing urgency.
It’s no secret that British teenage pregnancy rates are the highest in Europe. Thankfully, not all politicians subscribe to Stewart Jackson’s reductive view, and a recent attempt to get compulsory sex and relationship education back on the political agenda couldn’t be better timed. Put forward by Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda, the bill only applies to England, and, as previous parliamentary bills on SRE have stated, parents have the option to remove their child from the lessons. But it’s a promising start, and the bill stood unopposed during its first reading in parliament last Wednesday (8th). Whilst introducing the bill to parliament, Bryant made the glaringly apparent yet under reported observation that Britain’s teen pregnancy rates may be so high compared to other countries because our many of our European counterparts many other have compulsory sex and relationship education policies already in place.
Knowledge is power, and logic suggests that it makes sense to equip young people with the education and information they need to embark on safe and healthy sex lives. This means teaching them about the ins and outs before they’re likely to run off and experiment- and in a commercially sex saturated culture, that age is decreasing. As the ‘sexualisation of children’ debate rumbles on, not enough has been said about sex and relationship education that has the potential to counteract the images young people come across almost every day.

Young people are aware of the facts, and in 2008 the UK Youth Parliament launched a campaign called Are You Getting It?, releasing a report that simply said sex education is too little, too late. There’s an unmistakable dichotomy here- late sex and relationship education paired with early exposure to sex and raunch culture appears to fuel the climbing STI and teen pregnancy rates.
Sex education came tantalisingly close to a stamp of legitimacy in 2008, when the previous government agreed to make sex and relationships education a fixture on the national curriculum. Those plans were shelved this year by former Schools Minister Ed Balls, who caving to Conservative opposition, redrafted the Children, Schools and Families Bill a month before the general election. At the time, current Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove buried his head firmly in the sand about the issue, telling the BBC “children are children until they are 16, and after that they are adults”. This, in defence of Tory opposition to remove a parent’s right to stop their children receiving sex education under the age of 15.

Young people are having sex and will continue to do so. Effective sex education is available, but the fact that it isn’t yet compulsory means that some schools choose not to use the resource, instead, laying responsibility at the door of parents. If kids can’t get the information from their parents, they risk an all too common tragedy of attempting to cobble together an education based on peer pressure, pornography, and pop culture.