Exploiting Childhood by Wild Jim James Oliver

Author:Wild, Jim, James, Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

THE CULTURE AS PERPETRATOR

Take a stroll through pop culture, and what you’ll see are images of a hypersexualized, young, thin, toned, hairless, technologically—and in many cases surgically—enhanced young woman with a come-hither look on her face. We all recognize the look: slightly parted glossy lips, head tilted to the side, inviting eyes, and a body contorted to give the (presumed male) viewer maximum gazing rights to her body. Britney, Rhianna, Beyoncé, Paris, Katy, Lindsay, Kim, Miley, and the thousands of nameless models who stare out from the pages of women’s magazines, represent images of contemporary idealized femininity—in a word, hot—that are held up for women, especially young women, to emulate.

In today’s image-based culture, there is no escaping the image and no respite from its power when it is relentless in its visibility. If you think I am exaggerating, then flip through a magazine at the supermarket checkout, channel surf, take a drive to look at billboards, or watch TV ads. These images have now normalized the female body as a commodity that exists to be examined, scrutinized, dissected, and emulated. And this female body is getting younger. In 2011, ten-year-old Thylane Blondeau seductively posed on a bed for the French edition of Vogue, and Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2011 spring line included the “Ashley” bikini top (geared toward children as young as eight), which comes with thick padding for breast enhancement.

People not immersed in pop culture tend to assume that what we see today is just more of the same stuff that previous generations grew up on. After all, every generation has had its hot and sultry stars who led expensive and wild lives compared with the rest of us. But what is different today is not only the hypersexualization of the image, but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female. Today’s tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalized the porn-star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim, and downright boring. Today a girl or young woman looking for an alternative to the hypersexualized look will soon come to the grim realization that the only alternative to looking “fuckable” is to be invisible.

Media targeted at girls and women creates a social reality that is so overwhelmingly consistent that it is almost a closed system of messages. In this way, it is the sheer ubiquity of the hypersexualized images that gives them power, since they normalize and publicize a coherent story about femininity and sexuality. Because these messages are everywhere, they take on an aura of such familiarity that we believe them to be our very own personal and individual ways of thinking. They have the power to seep into the core part of our identities to such a degree that we think that we are freely choosing to look and act a certain way because it makes us feel confident, desirable, and happy. But, as scholar Rosalind Gill (2009, p.106) points out,

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