Girlpower1 links us to this article about the budding ‘modesty movement’ in America, aimed at the same young girls who are being targeted and/or influenced by marketers and popular culture to participate in the ‘raunch culture’ instead of a more innocent, non-sexualized childhood. The author uses celebrities who are constantly in the media and in the tabloids, and the recent Paris Hilton-goes-to-jail debacle, as a starting-off point for her conversation–Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, etc. She points to their ‘vulgarity’ and asks, are these the role models we want for our young girls?

The author, Colleen Carroll Campbell, gets so much right:

Today’s pop culture tells women that sexual power is the kind that counts most and they can achieve it by showing skin. That message has trickled down to girls, forcing them to trade carefree childhood pleasures for sexual competition.

You can see them in the mall, tugging nervously at their skimpy shorts and halter tops, straining to see how men react to their little bellies flouncing out of low-slung jeans. They look more exploited than empowered as they fuss and cringe, adjust and squirm. How odd that in an age when girls have more athletic and academic opportunities than ever, girlhood has become a high-pressure dress-rehearsal for adult mating games.

This is no doubt, disturbing. As are the following conclusions:

The American Psychological Association recently issued an alarming report on this trend, concluding that girls who view themselves as sex objects are more prone to academic failure, depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and poor self-image…A 2005 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine showed a strong correlation between sexual activity and depression in teenage girls – a correlation far stronger than the one seen in boys, with girls’ depression rates rising as the number of sexual partners rose. The study suggests that sexual experimentation is not a symptom but a cause of depression in teenage girls.

No doubt it’s a problem that sexual activity and depression are so strongly correlated among teenage girls. But I think the author makes a big leap when she says that the study ’suggests’ that sexual experimentation is the cause of depression. It’s too patronizing and moralistic, and she doesn’t cite it to boot. It’s a justification for the ‘modesty movement’ she describes and supports:

Many parents feel powerless to resist the objectification of their daughters. But others are fighting back. A new modesty movement is sprouting in cities from Denver to Atlanta, with Pure Fashion shows drawing crowds of modesty-conscious mothers and daughters, new retailers like Shade Clothing reporting multi-million dollar sales figures for clothes that keep private parts private, and feisty online communities like ModestyZone.net encouraging rebels against raunchy culture.

The girls and women behind this movement say they are not looking to revive gunny-sack dresses or relive the 1950s. They simply want to be seen as more than the sum of their body parts.

Again, capitalism (note that this is becoming a multi-million dollar industry) is dressed up with a certain ideology, but in this case, it’s an ideology of the ’struggle for protection from sexual influences,’ not the ‘movement toward liberation through the use of my sexuality.’

Don’t get me wrong; of course children shouldn’t be sexualized. But there comes a time in life called puberty, and at that time, both boys and girls do realize their sexuality. While a teenage girl should entirely have the choice the dress herself modesty, what I see here is not a choice, but rather a reaction against the other ‘choice’ of participating in the raunch culture. Check out Campbell’s credentials–she is very much a part of the Christian Right, who also advocate abstinence-only sex education. Yes, teenage girls and young women are inappropriately sexualized in our society, but I also think they should be allowed the choice of discovering their sexuality, or sensuality, or pleasure in their bodies, or just a love for fashion or what have you. Ignoring the fact that sexuality exists among adolescents only leads to more problems itself.

Another troublesome aspect of both ‘choices’–the raunch culture, or the modesty movement–is that both are about changing how the girls represent themselves; neither are about changing how boys and men look at and treat girls. If we really want to give people more choices in our society, we need to come at it from many different angles, not just the Madonna/whore dichotomy that we still look at women through.

Ew. (No, not at the picture of Dakota, but at what I’m about to write about).

I mentioned the countdown clock to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday in a previous post (which is now counting down to their 21st birthdays–which I don’t really understand, because once you’ve been in rehab for a cocaine addiction, does it really matter when you can legally buy alcohol?).  But I wasn’t prepared to find a similar countdown clock to Dakota Fanning’s 18th birthday.  It’s really obscene, juxtaposing a very childlike layout (the color pink, hearts, stars, a picture of Dakota smiling all child-like) with the desire for her to become an adult–why?  So she can legally pose nude and sick people can enjoy their jailbait.

I shouldn’t really be surprised, though.  Any female in the public eye, regardless of whether she’s even an adult yet, is sexualized, or at least judged severely on her looks.  This countdown definitely poses a problem, though, in terms of if pedophiles will go see Hounddog just to see Dakota Fanning’s character get raped.

Sigh.

There was a post over at the main blog about Keisha Castle-Hughes’ now being a mother!  I talked briefly about the issue in a previous post in which I wondered what ramifications this would have on ‘girl power’ and young girls who look up to either Castle-Hughes or her character in Whale Rider.

The post on the main blog brings up how teen pregnancy is usually brought up in the media, though–as a ‘problem’ in poor Black & Latino communities.  So far I haven’t addressed race on this blog, and I think this is a grey issue that relates to some of the other themes of cultural studies.  Obviously, we don’t want babies to be born into the world unwanted.  So why not celebrate pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood?  However, there’s also the fact that a lot of these babies are born into poverty, and that possibly if the parents had received the same opportunities that people in wealthier communities receive–namely, access to the same standard of education and being put on the track to college–they wouldn’t have had the babies.  It’s that question again–can you really be empowered when your options are limited by society?  In the case of the ‘problem’ of teen pregnancy, it definitely seems good that people try to create their own narratives within the system by celebrating pregnancy and making it something worthwhile, even if it’s just for lack of a better option.

The case of Keisha Castle-Hughes, though, is a strange one.  It’s like the reason the mainstream media can celebrate it without decrying her for being so young is BECAUSE of her extreme fame and wealth.  And although she played a Maori character in Whale Rider, and the Maori are traditionally underserved in New Zealand much as the Black & Latino communities are in the U.S., she is half-Maori and half-white, and therefore seems to pass as white in the media.  This is sort of tangential, but I wonder if that had anything to do with getting her the lead role in Whale Rider…

But yeah, racial issues among tweens are very important and will be looked at in upcoming posts.

In class last week, we had a discussion about tweens and how young girls are being sexualized earlier and earlier, especially through marketing.  One of the points that someone brought up was how as the perennial Disney stars grew up, so did their fan base.  To qualify that: while the teen stars actually aged, their fan bases, while remaining the same age (not the same individual girls as before), have grown up with them.

From  to

One thing I am reminded of is the ever-creepy countdown to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday (them being finally ‘legal’), and bets on who would pose for Playboy, Maxim, etc., first.  I found a website counting down to their 21st birthdays; it has a timer and everything, just like there was for their 18th birthdays.  I have to wonder, if websites like this are so widely profilerated all over the Internet, and the acceptance of ‘jailbait’ as something sexy and desired is so widespread, how is it not surprising that young girls are becoming sexual/sexualized earlier and earlier?

Right now, Mary-Kate and Ashley are in college, snorting coke and struggling with anorexia and being hounded by the tabloids–not exactly actions that we want preteen girls to emulate.  However, the constant media (tabloids, yes, but still media) attention paid to them and their problems only makes such news readily available to young girls, who have not yet fully developed their reasoning capabilities.  I don’t want to say that the media is to blame for everything, but I do think there must be some correlation between such ’scandal’ being so widely published and talked about, and young girls developing body image issues and eating disorders–and with that, a more ‘grown-up’ sense of sexuality–earlier on.