Sexpot Virgins: The Media's Sexualization of Young Girls

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet. Posted May 24, 2008.

In 2006, the retail chain Tesco launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a play set designed to help young girls "unleash the sex kitten inside."

Perturbed parents, voicing concern that their 5-year-olds might be too young to engage in sex work, lobbied to have the product pulled. Tesco removed the play set from the toy section but kept it on the market.

As M. Gigi Durham points out in The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, Tesco's attempt to sell stripper gear to kids is just one instance of the sexual objectification of young girls in the media and marketplace. Some of the many other examples include a push-up bra for preteens, thongs for 10-year-olds bearing slogans like "eye candy," and underwear geared toward teens with "Who needs credit cards ... ?" written across the crotch.

Targeted by marketers at increasingly younger ages, girls are now being exposed to the kind of unhealthy messages about sexuality that have long dogged grown women. Girls are told that their worth hinges on being "hot," which in mainstream media parlance translates into thin, white, makeupped and scantily clad. Meanwhile, acting on their sexual impulses earns them the epithet "slut." Teen magazines advise girls on how to tailor their look and personality to please boys (in order to entrap them in relationships). Advertisements present violence toward women as sexy.

According to Durham, the regressive messages about sexuality that circulate in mainstream media hamper the healthy sexual development of kids and teens.

Durham's critique does not end with the corporate media. She also faults adults for failing to engage in reasonable, open dialogue with teens about sex -- thus leaving the sexual education of young people to a media primarily concerned with generating profit, as opposed to, say, selflessly helping young people develop healthy ideas about sexuality.

AlterNet talked to Durham on the phone about the sexual objectification of girls in the media and how to help them challenge regressive messages about their sexuality.

What's the "Lolita Effect," and why is it harmful?

The Lolita Effect is the media's sexual objectification of young girls. In the Nabokov novel the protagonist, who is 12 years old at the start of the book, is the object of desire for Humbert Humbert the pedophile. In the book you're put into the mind of the predator; Lolita, in Humbert's view, initiates the sex and is very knowledgeable and all that. Nowadays the term Lolita has come to mean a little girl who is inappropriately sexual, wanton, and who sort of flaunts her sexuality and seduces older men. I'm very critical of that construction in the novel and in real life because little girls can't be held responsible in this way. They're not born with the understanding or intention of seducing older men, and the burden of responsibility can't be placed on children. They're just too young to knowingly enter into these kinds of relationships. The Lolita Effect is the way our culture, and more importantly our corporate media, have constructed these little "Lolitas" by sexualizing them and marketing really sexualized items of clothing and behaviors to them -- constructing them as legitimate sexual actors when they aren't.

In your book you talk about how over the past 50 years female sex symbols have gotten a lot younger. In the 1950s you had people like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, who reached the peak of their popularity in their mid- to late 20s. Now there are 12-year-old models. What accounts for this shift?

That's interesting, isn't it? Marilyn Monroe was 27 when she starred in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It's a lot easier for me to accept someone pushing 30 as a sexual being. What accounts for this shift? I can make educated inferences even though of course we have no hard data about what actually caused it. Part of it is that marketers caught on, somewhere in the 1990s, which was a very prosperous time economically in the United States especially, that young kids, tweens and children had a lot of disposable income and were spending a lot of money. Last year the market research firm Euromonitor said that worldwide tween spending reached 170 billion dollars. I think a large part of it was the marketers' realization that they could cultivate cradle-to-grave consumers by targeting very young kids by getting them to buy into the frames that older women have been persuaded to buy into for a long time, such as trying to achieve unattainable bodies and present themselves as highly desirable to men. They could get little girls to start consuming cosmetics and fashion and even diet aides at very young ages and then hold onto them for longer. So I think a lot of it was a marketing impulse.

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