The Watchful Eye Newsletter
Mid-March, 2010
Mary Bailey, Editor
the watchfuleye@rcn.com
Why Am I Getting This?
By Mary Bailey
Why? Because either you’re a Montgomery County NOW member or you’re a friend of the person who forwarded this to you. Either way, we want you to read The Watchful Eye and become involved in our issue: the unprecedented sexualization of girls that is swamping our mainstream culture. Besides, this newsletter is free, no MC NOW membership required!
Almost always when I tell people we’re starting a Sexualization of Girls project, they get the gist and say something like, “Good for you!” -- followed by “Are you talking about what girls are wearing these days?” Yes, that’s part of it. But there’s a whole lot more, as you will see if you become a regular reader of these pages.
Our main mission is to increase people’s sensitivity to the sexualization of girls. We want them
to find it as disgusting as dogfighting, for nothing is more effective than strong public revulsion. In fact, nothing significant will change without solid, widespread, and durable public disgust.
A few particulars: Our project is inspired by the American Psychological Association’s report, “The Sexualization of Girls.” The report covers the mainstream cultural landscape – not only how the media, parents, teachers, and peers contribute to the way girls are viewed as sexualized beings, but how girls come to view themselves in that way as well. You can read a summary of the APA report at www.mcmdnow.org. or the full text at www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html. We’ll also cover parts of the report as we go along.
In brief, the APA has found that sexualizing girls during their formative years limits their future options by sidetracking their interest in schoolwork and affects their health by discouraging involvement in sports. Most tragic of all, it interferes with girls’ ability to develop their own identities, which is a major task of adolescence.
We want to reverse this ugly trend. May we count on you? We hope you will read our monthly newsletter on the sexualization of girls and forward it to people and organizations you think will (or should) be concerned with this fast-growing assault on girls.
If you already get our chapter newsletter, “From NOW On,” you automatically will receive “The Watchful Eye” about two weeks later. But if someone forwarded this to you, and you want to continue receiving it (it’s free, remember), please contact thewatchfuleye@rcn.com. Send your name, email address, general area where you live, and any thoughts, recommendations, and queries you may have. And please review your list of email addresses for possible forwardees anywhere in the world. Thank you for supporting this effort to spread concern about the sexualization of girls as far and as wide as possible.
A Grateful Eye
The Watchful Eye thanks Jeannette Feldner for designing this wonderful masthead. It expresses everything: awareness, concern, discontent, and determination to do something about the rampant sexualization of girls.
Girl See, Girl Do?
By Julia D. McMurry
“TWILIGHT.” Dropping the word in a public venue is enough to set off shouts of glee and noises of disgust so loud that you will instantly know what everyone within a ten-foot radius thinks of Stephenie Meyer’s work. But pose a complex question and the factions stop warring for a moment. When asked if Twilight sends an empowering or degrading message about women, people responded almost universally with the latter, regardless of their feelings toward the books. Many of the initial questions that accompany large and successful fads like Twilight center on the product at hand, asking why people are drawn to it. Just as important to understand is how the people involved are affected by this new idea. What started as one novel has grown into movies, fan fiction, and even Volvo ads. With this onslaught of Meyer-inspired media we must ask how Twilight is impacting its consumers, and what kinds of messages it is sending in regards to female sexually. To answer these questions I interviewed those most knowledgeable about the phenomenon, high school girls. The results were surprising. One self-acclaimed “Twilight-lover” even called the protagonist vampire, Edward, a “control freak” in relation to his girlfriend.
Those less devoted to the series vehemently echoed this sentiment, and added that Edward is stalker-like, but the book portrays this quality in a romantic light, making it seem a normal part of a relationship. In the first novel, Edward watches his human girlfriend Bella sleep all night, an action which delights her, and during the course of Eclipse Edward’s family essentially kidnaps her under the premise of “protection” from her closest friend, Jacob. Throughout the saga Bella is portrayed as not only subordinate to, but also emotionally dependent upon Edward. When he leaves her in New Moon, she recedes into deep depression for several months, and turns to Jacob for comfort. Some interviewees called this new companion her “rebound” from Edward’s rejection, and noted that it seems Bella needs a constant male presence in her life just to keep her functioning. Oddly, converse to this settle-for-anyone idea is the pervasive theme of “true love.” Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Twilight is the head-over-heels romance it portrays, and yet this intense and passionate relationship occurs between two teenagers who have just met and know little about one-another, a misguiding and inappropriate depiction.
Despite the generally negative female portrayal, most interviewees acknowledged that the Twilight saga does contain elements of empowerment. A large theme of the first three books is Bella’s persistent feeling of inadequacy and unworthiness of Edward’s love, which she expresses in Twilight when she remarks, “[he] was too perfect, I realized with a piercing stab of despair. There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me.” Yet despite this inequality Edward loves Bella and constantly reminds her that she does not need to become “better” or more suited to him to warrant his affection, a good message for girls. Furthermore, there is an interesting role-reversal that one interviewee pointed out, stating that Meyer flips the stereotypical high school couple by making the female the partner who wants to progress faster sexually, while Edward tries to remain fairly chaste to preserve Bella’s safety. This is in some ways an empowering message for women because it shows that traditional roles don’t have to apply and that women can be sexually liberated beings, free to push for what they want in a relationship.
The fact that so many teens seemed aware of underlying messages surprised me, so I asked if they believed that the main consumers of the media were also aware, and here there was mixed response. Some said that people are in-tune to the bad messages, but choose to ignore them out of discomfort with the fact they exist, or because they see Twilight as escapism trash and just don’t take it that seriously. Many, however, replied that the majority of consumers are unaware of these messages. When probed to describe the demographic most likely to emulate the behavior they read about or saw, most cited “young” girls in the tween and early teen years. Yet some of the people who made those statements were not much older. While Twilight may contain outdated or even degrading views of female sexuality, it seems “young adults” are sensitive to them and can look past the messages to the story underneath. The analysis Twilight provokes in readers’ minds is stronger than any words Meyer has penned.
Julia D. McMurry is a high school freshman who enjoys debating, acting, and long walks on the beach. When not writing articles, Miss McMurry spends her time planning how to make it to the Maryland General Assembly so she can advocate for minorities and environmentalists.
Girls Reaching Puberty Earlier
Abridged From Susan Brink, LA Times
It’s no longer unusual to see girls enter puberty at age 8, writes Susan Brink of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, it’s no longer considered abnormal. Today, white girls are developing breast buds as young as ages 7 and 8 and African American girls at an even younger 6 years of age.
And scientists are not sure they know the reason why. While childhood obesity is the only known correlate to early breast development, pediatricians and endocrinologists also suspect that the environment plays a part. The question is important because developing breasts at a younger age may be dangerous for girls’ health. Early menstruation is already a known risk factor for breast cancer. Might not early breast development also mean a health problem in the future?
Medical records in Europe show that between 1850 and 1950 the average age of a girl’s first period declined from about 17 to 13 years, probably because adequate food and sanitary sewer systems signaled the brain that it was safe to reproduce. In the U.S. in recent years, the age of first menstruation has been dropping at the rate of one month per decade for the last 30 years. The average age is now 12.5 years for white girls, 12.06 for black girls, and 12.09 for Latinas.
At the same time, the gap between girls’ first breast buds and their first period has widened by as much as one and a half years between the 1960s and the 1990s, and is now close to three years. This means, according to Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, the decline in girls’ age of maturity has moved from being caused by positive reasons such as better nutrition, to negative ones, such as over-eating, not exercising – and perhaps chemical pollution, the great unknown.
“My fear,” says Herman-Giddens, “is that medical groups could take the data and say, ‘This is normal. We don’t have to worry about it.’ My feeling is that it is not normal. It’s a response to an abnormal environment.”
Environmental activists are asking whether breast buds in third graders are caused by hormones in food, pesticides in produce, or phthalates in plastics and cosmetics. They also want to know if sexually suggestive TV shows or the stress of fatherless homes has anything to do with an early onset of puberty. These suspicions are hard to prove.
Herman-Giddens acknowledges that it is extremely difficult to obtain evidence of environmental causes. “With all the estrogen-like elements in the environment, it’s virtually impossible to study. There’s no place to find an unexposed population.” Her biggest concern, however, is that earlier puberty means a longer lifetime exposure to estrogen. And we already know that long exposure --early puberty combined with a late menopause -- is known to increase the risk of getting cancer.
And there is another problem: What happens when a girl’s physical appearance gets far ahead of her mental and emotional maturity – especially in our highly sexualized society? As Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, says, “Whatever they look like, they know nothing. Eight- and 9-year olds are learning to make change for a dollar. These are children who are learning the most fundamental facts in school. Imagine trying to teach that child the fundamentals of sex. They’re not even playing Monopoly yet. They’re still playing Candyland.” (“Modern Puberty,” Los Angeles Times, 1-21-08)
Yes, But What Does It Mean?
Sexualization: A Sociologist’s View
By Jill Niebrugge-Brantley
What is “the sexualization of girls”?
The sexualization of girls is part of the much larger process of socialization. When sociologists talk about “socialization,” they mean the process of teaching or learning how to be a member of a group. When we talk about socialization to gender roles—like boys and girls or women and men—we are talking about one of the fundamental ways we are taught to fit in to almost all situations: that is, we learn not simply how to be a human being in a situation but how to be a girl or boy, a man or woman, in that situation or group life experience. The sexualization of girls teaches girls—and through it girls learn—that to be successful group members they must be, among and in addition to other qualities, sexually attractive to boys/men. The sexualization of girls teaches that being an object of male sexual desire is a sine qua non of being a successful girl—other things may also be required, but this is basic.
Why is this a problem?
The heavy emphasis upon sexualization of girls in today’s socialization in childhood is a problem for at least three reasons.
First, it socializes girls to being an object and there are problems with socializing anyone to being an object. One could potentially be socialized to being an object of utility, and think of oneself only in terms of what one is to do for others; one could be socialized to being an object of ridicule or a scapegoat and think of oneself only in terms of how one is responsible for bad things happening; one could be socialized to being an object of attention and think of oneself chiefly in terms of how others are seeing one. Being socialized to being an object of any sort denies what many people see as chief qualities of humanness—the ability to act as a moral agent in the world, the ability to know oneself, the ability to be responsible for oneself, the ability to function as an independent subjectivity. Being socialized to be an object removes one’s basic independence.
Second, the sexualization of girls forces girls to evaluate themselves in terms of how they physically appear to others and to value only one form of physical appearance—a kind of beauty that is sexually alluring. The sexualization of girls creates a culture of what American writer Sherwood Anderson described as “grotesques” by which he meant people who take a particular truth and let it becomes so overwhelming that they become misshapen by it. Anderson writes, “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” I like this understanding because it allows for the vibrancy and vitality we associate with sexuality but says when that becomes your only standard for vibrancy and vitality—your only truth—then you become grotesque. We are in danger of producing a grotesque generation if we do not draw back from making sexuality the standard by which girls believe they will be evaluated.
Third, the sexualization of girls, as these two points suggest, has negative effects for the whole society. In a democracy, we really cannot have a block of citizens socialized to be the objects of other people’s definitions, the instruments of other people’s will. We cannot afford the enormous loss of talent that may occur as these individual girls are caught up in a constant quest to establish sexual attractiveness to the abandonment of other goals.
What is the cause of “the sexualization of girls”? Is this a new phenomenon?
To some degree this is a problem with long historic roots in patriarchy. Girls almost from the beginning of recorded history have been socialized to see themselves as objects—their futures to a great degree have depended on their becoming the objects of male desire or their parents arranging for them to be so. From Biblical pronouncements on, the vision of the life course of the woman has been that she will grow from girlhood into an adolescence in which she is picked by or assigned to some man and will go to be a part of his family, basically, an object within that family, bringing with her in many cases a dowry of other objects to enhance her worth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1898 in the book that became the bible of First Wave feminism, Women and Economics, described girls’ fate in what she called:
“the enforced attitude of the woman towards marriage. To the young girl, as has been previously stated, marriage is the one road to fortune, to life. She is born highly specialized as a female: she is carefully educated and trained to realize in all ways her sex-limitations and her sex-advantages. What she has to gain even as a child is largely gained by feminine tricks and charms. Her reading, both in history and fiction, treats of the same position for women; and romance and poetry give it absolute predominance. Pictorial art, music, the drama, society, everything, tells her that she is she and that all depends on whom she marries. Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain. . . ."he" is the coming world.
“With such a prospect as this before her; with an organization specially developed to this end; with an education adding every weight of precept and example, of wisdom and virtue, to the natural instincts; with a social environment the whole machinery of which is planned to give the girl a change to be seen, to provide her with "opportunities"' and with all the pressure of personal advantage and self-interest added to the sex-instinct,--what one would logically expect is a society full of desperate and eager husband-hunters, regarded with popular approval.
“Not at all! Marriage is the woman's proper sphere, her divinely ordered place, her natural end. It is what she is born for, what she is trained for, what is exhibited for. It is, moreover, her means of an honorable livelihood and advancement. But--she must not even look as if she wanted it! She must not turn her hand over to get it. She must sit passive as the seasons go by, and her "chances" lessen with each year. Think of the strain on a highly sensitive nervous organism to have so much hang on one thing, to see the possibility of attaining it grow less and less yearly, and to be forbidden to take any step toward securing it! This she must bear with dignity and grace to the end. . . .”
Fro m many years teaching this passage, I can tell you that I have never had a class in which even one quarter of the students felt that it was all right for the woman to initiate a date or to be the one who proposed marriage. So the sexualization of girls continues a long tradition of training in passivity.
What has perhaps somewhat changed over time is the form seen as necessary or appropriate for being an object of male desire—or let us say, of male assessments as marriageable. In earlier periods, promises of fertility may have been most important; chastity has a long history as a desirable attribute in a woman. What seems new at this moment is that being sexually attractive seems to require a more overt and even blatant presentation of self and ongoing suggestion that one is not only attractive but sexually available. Thus, it seems that the performance requirements for “doing sexually attractive” have become much more demanding and are being demanded at earlier ages.
Why has this change occurred?
I would explain the change in terms of two processes, both arising out of capitalism in its later configurations. The first was wonderfully described about twenty years ago in Naomi Wolfe’s The Beauty Myth. By making extraordinary beauty, thinness, sexual attractiveness—whatever term you wish to use here—by making that the standard, capitalism had hit on a permanent source of income. Basically, no woman can be sure of being attractive enough; women live in a condition of perpetual anomie where physical appearance is concerned: if nothing else, the fact that day by day a woman grows older and becoming older is equated with becoming less attractive compels the woman to be always involved in the struggle to attain or retain beauty. This is a permanent cash cow for a huge industry. And since
capitalism depends on expanding markets, one way to expand this market is to change the age of one’s target audience—to go to the elderly and to go to the young, and interestingly so far, it appears that the young are the more sought-after audience. Simply stated, there are big bucks to be made here.
A second cause may be in what the late Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.” “Sublimation,” of course, in Freudian theory, is a socially positive experience in that a person takes an unacceptable emotion and channels it into some socially acceptable and useful energy. A classic example is someone like Walt Whitman rechanneling unacceptable homoerotic feelings into the production of Leaves of Grass. In “desublimation,” society allows individuals to make conscious---and participate
in---formerly forbidden emotions and experiences. But these emotions and experiences are presented in what is in reality a fairly limited and even mechanized form: the erotic is, as Marcuse says, experienced only in a “localized sexuality.” Yet this localized sexuality is presented as so available and defined as so completely fulfilling, that the individual is—here again, I quote Marcuse—“preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered.” This is important because it means there is a steady whittling away of the capacity for critical thought.
All this leads to a point where parents find themselves pressured by children, by advertising, by TV sitcoms, by songs, by movies, etc., to accept a situation—the sexualization of girls—that they may at moments have doubts about.
Jill Niebrugge-Brantley is currently Scholar in Residence at American University; her scholarly interests are in sociological theory, especially feminist social theory; the history of sociology, especially women in that history, and the sociology of gender. She has taught social theory and women’s studies at American University, The George Washington University, the University of Iowa and Gettysburg College. She is Professor Emerita in Northern Virginia Community College. Brantley is interested in the microsocial and macrosocial implications of the sexualization of girls.
A Most Insidious Consequence
“Perhaps the most insideous consequence of self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study demonstrated this fragmenting quite vividly (Frederickson et al, 1998). While alone in a dressing room, college students were asked to try on and evaluate either a swimsuit or a sweater. While they waited for 10 minutes wearing the garment, they completed a math test. The results revealed that young women in swimsuits performed significantly worse on the math problems than did those wearing sweaters. No differences were found for young men. In other words, thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity. Recent research has shown that this impairment occurs among African American, Latina, and Asian American young women (Hebi, King & Lin, 2004) and extends beyond mathematics to other cognitive domains including logical reasoning and spatial skills (Gapinski, Brownell, & LaFrance, 2003).
“The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualization may contribute to girls’ dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school…..Studies show that single-sex math classes lead girls to feel less self-conscious and improve their math performance substantially (Rutti, 1997). This may not be solely because boys would otherwise dominate the classroom (one popular explanation for the success of single-sex math classes for girls) but also because without boys, girls can literally take their minds off their own bodies and think more effectively.” (American Psychological Association, “Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Women,” 2007, p.22)
A Salute To Holden Caulfield
By Mary Bailey
J.D. Salinger died earlier this year after a lifetime as a recluse. His “The Catcher in the Rye” has been loved by liberals of all stripes ever since its publication in 1951. Does anyone not know Salinger’s teenage hero, Holden Caulfield? The book is a record of three days in December when Holden drops out of boarding school and wanders the streets of New York.
Holden’s thoughts, as related in a first-person narrative, infuriated conservative critics at the time. For starters, Holden disrespects parental authority by rejecting his father’s wish that he take courses in business management. Next, he litters his language with words such as “goddam,” “fart,” and “for Chrissake.” But worst of all, when a hotel elevator operator offers to send a prostitute to his room, the virginal Holden agrees to the arrangement. No teenager should read about or model oneself on such an impious, vulgar, and impure boy, the conservatives maintained.
Reading this same book, a feminist might come to a different conclusion. Like a Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield navigates the seductions of the big city without succumbing to them. His moral compass always points true. For instance, when the prostitute arrives at his hotel room, Holden describes her as “very nervous, for a prostitute. She really was. I think it was because she was young as hell. She was around my age.” He ends up paying her and sending her away. Holden admits to the reader that he can’t get very sexy with a girl unless he likes her a lot. “The trouble was, I just didn’t want to do it. I felt more depressed than sexy, if you want to know the truth. She was depressing.”
Throughout the book, Holden emphasizes how much he likes women and girls. His two favorite people are his kid sister Phoebe and his friend Jane. In his wanderings he notes the kindness of a woman checking hats in a nightclub, chats amiably in a diner with two nuns on a mission of charity, and empathizes with girls he encounters who are not conventionally pretty. But Holden doesn’t care much for most men and boys. To him, his corporate lawyer father misuses his education by making money instead of saving innocent lives. And he is disgusted with a student advisor who refers to his dates as “whores.” Only two males make the grade with Holden Caulfield: a classmate who committed suicide after being cruelly teased by the other boys, and his favorite teacher, Mr. Antolini.
Holden visits Mr. Antolini and his wife, who make him a bed on the couch for the night. Antolini tells him, “you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.” He gives Holden a wonderful reason to stay in school and get an education. It is the best advice any teenager could want. “If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing.” But later, Mr. Antolini does, or seems to do, the unforgivable. He makes a pass at his student, and Holden bolts for the door.
Holden spends the remainder of his time wheeling around town, rubbing out all the “Fuck You” signs he can find so that children won’t come upon them. In the end, he dreams of being a catcher in the rye, saving little kids who run through the high grass from falling off the cliff of adult phoniness and immorality.
When “The Catcher in the Rye” made its debut, the cant from some literary critics was to characterize it as a boy’s fear of approaching manhood. But that was the 1950s, and that was not fear. Unfortunately, Holden, you were born too soon. You would have loved the feminist movement. Many of our issues are on the national stage now, Holden, and the sexualization of girls that you encountered with the young prostitute is no longer safe from public scrutiny and condemnation.
Sightings
American teen girls feel pressured by the fashion and media industries to be thin, according to a survey of 1,000 girls between 13 and 17 conducted by the Girl Scouts of the USA. Three quarters of the girls said fashion is “really important” to them, but that they’re more likely to buy clothes seen on real models than on skinny ones. More than 80 percent said they’d prefer to see natural photos of models than photos that have been digitally altered. However, noted Toronto’s National Post, “While most American teenage girls understand that the fashion industry manipulates images of beauty, they still strive, many unhealthily, to attain a skinny figure.” (National Post, 2-01-10)
Look At This! For an education in advertising, google “You Tube Dove evolution.” After watching the short video of a face, click on the small picture of the woman in a bathing suit.
At least three recent movies dissect sexual situations between teenage girls and older men. At one end of the social continuum is An Education, which should be viewed by every almost-of-age middle class girl considering an affair with an older man. In the middle is Fish Tank, where a 15-year-old living in an industrial neighborhood is seduced by her mother’s boyfriend. At the other end, Precious makes palpable the near-murder of a teenage girl’s soul by the combined forces of impoverished surroundings, emotional abuse, and incest.
Because he could. Fourteen seems to have been a magical age for Elvis Presley, writes Alanna Nash in her newly published book “Baby, Let’s Play House.” He often hosted three 14-year-old girls to private pajama parties in his Memphis bedroom, where they’d laugh, tickle and kiss. But “all you’d have to do is say, ‘Stop!’, and he’d roll over and quit,”one of the girls later said, adding “I think that if he’d really pushed, I would have done it.” Elvis’s mother never objected to the parties that took place in her house. “Gladys knew that Elvis, a boy-man, was looking for a child-woman he could mold into his idea of a perfect mate,” Nash wrote, and fourteen-year-olds “were just the right age, as they allowed him to play the role of the older man who would teach them about life.” Exhausted by adult affairs and insecure about his sexuality, Elvis gravitated toward 13- and 14-year-old girls who were content to simply make out, said Larry Geller, a member of his entourage. The relationship between Presley and the three Memphis girls lasted from 1956 to the early 1960s, when he met his future wife, 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. (Abridged from a chapter reprinted in The Week, 1-19-10)
“Frontline postpones ‘Dancing Boys of Afghanistan’ film,” headlined Broadcasting & Cable. For the program, Afghan journalist Najbulah Quraishi infiltrated a sex ring in Northern Afghanistan and documented Afghan authorities’ complicity in sexual exploitation. The documentary, scheduled to air January 19, was delayed over concerns for the safety of one of the interviewed boys. “The documentary details the ancient Afghan custom of ‘Bacha Bereesh,’ which literally means ‘beardless boys,’ who are trained to dance and sing for male audiences,” Broadcasting & Cable said. “The boys are sold to wealthy patrons and former warlords who keep them as concubines. Islamic clerics are outraged by the practice, and have ordered the authorities to crack down.” (B&C, 1-15-10)
How many would the First Amendment allow? The British Home Office accepted a report by TV psychologist Dr. Linda Papapoulos on the sexualization of women and girls. Among her 36 recommendations: Sell mobile phones and game consoles with parental controls already switched on; ban sexualized music videos on TV before 9 pm; create a website for reporting irresponsible marketing; insert a symbol when a published photograph has been digitally altered; give the Advertising Standards Authority power to act against sexualized ads targeting teens. (news.BBC.co.uk/8537734)
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