Introduction

Abstract

In So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, American educationalists Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne (2008) weave a cautionary tale for parents about the damage caused by sexualizing media and the commodities it advertises. Toys, clothes, magazines, television, and the Internet are all said to foster the desire to emulate “the sexy celebrities who populate their cultural landscape,” a risk that increases with repeated exposure (American Psychological Association Task Force 2007, 3).¹ Designed to make “girls look physically appealing and sexy,” sexualization is understood as a process that “inappropriately imposes [sexuality] upon” them (2). As a result, sexualization is thought to chip away a girl’s capacity to form relationships, sexual or otherwise, in the future (Levin and Kilbourne 2008).² The end point of this process is individual and social, it fosters a perilous environment wherein girls, plagued by low self-esteem, engage in self-destructive behavior and it promotes wider social ills such as the trafficking in women and girls (ibid.). British educationalist and author of Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World Is Damaging Our Children and What We Can Do about It, Sue Palmer offers a similar warning in an interview in London’s Daily Telegraph (Nikkhah 2009; Palmer 2007).³ Sexualizing images, according to Palmer, promote an “entirely inappropriate ladette culture” where excessive drinking, violence, and antisocial behavior blossom—as a result, a horrific type of “sexual ethos” comes to be seen as natural (quoted in Nikkhah 2009; Palmer (2007)).⁴

Children are learning lessons from today’s sexualized environment that can undermine the very foundations they need in order to grow up to be capable of having caring relationships of any kind, including those relationships in which sex plays a role. Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne (2008) As a father of four I find [Bill Henson’s photographs] offensive and disgusting … I don’t understand why parents would agree to allow their kids to be photographed like this. The cornerstone of any civilised society is the protection of its kids and there can be no justification for some of these images. I’m all for free speech, but never at the expense of a child’s safety and innocence.

Nathan Rees quoted in David Marr and Josephine Tovey (2008)