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Grade-school Lolita: ‘So Sexy
So Soon’
NBC Today Show
August 6,
2008
In their new book “So Sexy
So Soon” authors Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne write
about the trend of children becoming sexualized at a
young age due to media images and marketing campaigns
that encourage youth to be “sexy,” and they offer advice
on how parents can protect their kids. An excerpt.
Chapter one: Never too
young to be sexy
It has never been easy being a parent. But
today, it has gotten even more difficult. A 2002 survey
by an organization called Public Agenda found that 76
percent of parents felt it was a lot harder to raise
children today than when they were growing up, and 47
percent reported that their biggest challenge was trying
to protect their children from negative societal
influences, including disturbing and confusing images,
violence, and age-inappropriate messages appearing in
the media. How would you have answered this survey? Are
you, too, having a hard time trying to protect your
children from negative influences? Are you finding it
difficult to set and enforce limits on the media that
your children are exposed to — to determine how much,
when, and what? As parents, you are often told that it’s
your job to “just say no” to all of the inappropriate
content out there, and that this will solve the problem.
But just saying no won’t solve the problem, and anyway,
you can’t say no to everything! Instead, we simply have
to deal with the popular culture in our children’s
lives, often at the most unexpected times, in unforeseen
ways, and whether we want to or not. This book is
designed to help you do just that. And in order to be
able to do so, the first order of business is to examine
and recognize when and how the new sexualized childhood
is influencing children from a young age.
Several recent books and news
and research reports have expressed concern about
today’s sexual attitudes and behavior of many
adolescents, and increasingly even tweens (eight- to
twelve-year-olds). These accounts often make it seem as
if the behavior in question suddenly appears out of a
vacuum when children enter high school (or middle
school). Rarely do we hear about what was happening in
the early years that paved the way for what is happening
with teens.
There is a lot going on in
children’s lives around issues of sexuality and sexiness
that is important for the caring adults in their lives
to recognize. The following stories from parents and
teachers make it very clear that if we are to understand
and deal with the sexualization of childhood, we must
begin our efforts with very young children.
Crying in the bathtub
Jennifer reported that one evening not long
ago, her seven-year-old daughter Hannah began crying in
the bathtub. Alarmed, Jennifer asked what was wrong.
Hannah responded, “I’m fat! I’m fat! I want to be pretty
like Isabelle — sexy like her! Then Judd would like me
too!” Jennifer knew Isabelle, a very thin, very popular
girl in Hannah’s class who wore “stylish” clothes that
Jennifer thought were inappropriate for a
seven-year-old. Jennifer put her hand on Hannah’s
shoulder and said she liked Hannah’s body — it was a
wonderful body for a seven-year-old and she certainly
didn’t need to lose weight. But Hannah continued to cry
and to say that she wanted to go on a diet. Jennifer
felt uncertain about what to say or do next. In her
view, Hannah had a normal body for a seven-year-old
girl. Jennifer thought it must be abnormal for such a
young child to be thinking about diets, let alone
wanting boys to like her for being “pretty” and “sexy.”
But, normal or not, Jennifer saw that Hannah was truly
concerned and distressed, and she wanted to do something
to help.
As Jennifer strove to
understand Hannah’s outburst, she was tempted to put a
lot of the blame on Hannah’s friends, who were becoming
increasingly influential and important to her. Recently,
Hannah had come home from a playdate talking about
having had a fashion show with her friend’s Bratz dolls.
Jennifer was concerned that when Hannah and her friends
played together they often acted out going on “dates”
and having weddings with their Barbie dolls, but she was
truly horrified by the time they spent at other houses
with Bratz dolls — by their name, their anorexic-looking
bodies, their overt sexuality and hookerlike wardrobe,
as well as by the focus on shopping and appearance as
the point of the play. When she voiced her reservations
about Hannah’s having the dolls, Hannah said that
everyone else had them and that she loved playing with
them at other children’s houses. She and her friends
liked dressing them up and having them go shopping and
out on dates. Although Jennifer didn’t give in, she
wasn’t sure what she would do when Hannah’s birthday
arrived the following month. She was certain some other
girls would give these dolls to Hannah as gifts. Even if
Jennifer took them away, she knew Hannah would continue
to play with them at her friends’ homes. Recently,
Hannah had begun to nag about joining the Bratz website,
an online community where kids can play and buy things
for their Bratz dolls in cyberspace, along with other
children who are logged on.
Deep down, however, Jennifer
realized that what worried her most was where this
interest in appearance, popularity, and sexiness would
lead. If Hannah was dissatisfied with her body at the
age of seven, she wondered how she might feel at
thirteen. Jennifer had seen news stories about an
increase in precocious sexual behavior among children
and teens, and she knew that eating disorders were on
the rise, even among little girls. Were Hannah’s tears
about her body the first sign of such trouble for her?
What was the relationship between concerns about body
image and sexuality? And what did she mean by being
“sexy” anyway? Knowing how high the stakes were,
Jennifer felt almost desperate to find the right way to
respond. But she was upset with herself for feeling
unsure, even anxious, about knowing the right thing to
say or do.
Professional wrestling
girls
Nora, a highly experienced kindergarten
teacher, told us about an incident with a child that
left her scrambling to figure out how to respond. In his
daily school journal, five-year-old James had made a
drawing of what looked to Nora like a woman, with long
hair and bright red lips as well as big wavy circles on
her chest that looked like breasts. Next to the drawing
he had written the letter W over and over again. Nora
asked him to tell her about his picture. She was caught
off guard when James explained that his drawing was of
“a professional wrestling girl with big boobies.”
“At first I thought he was
trying to be fresh, to be a wise guy, but I caught
myself before I reacted too harshly,” Nora reported. “I
took a deep breath and tried to think through how to
respond. I decided to start with a question.” (This is
almost always a good way to start when you’re not quite
sure what to say.) So Nora asked James what he knew
about “wrestling girls.” He matter-of-factly replied
with his eyes open wide, “I saw her on TV last night
with my [big] brother, Brett. He was babysitting! He let
me stay up late and watch with him! It’s a secret!” She
was glad she had asked him the initial question about
what he knew about wrestling girls, because his response
helped her begin to get a handle on what was going on
for James.
Nora recalled that it was the
look on James’s face when he answered her, of both
bravado and worry at the same time, that left her
confused and concerned. She knew that James’s parents
were quite clear about limiting the amount and kind of
media in his life. She knew how much James looked up to
fourteen-year-old Brett and admired everything he did.
She was pretty sure that James’s parents would be
distressed if they knew about Brett and James’s secret!
She was also pretty sure that if James shared the secret
with her, he was asking for something, but what exactly
was it?
Rather than try to work it all
out with James at that moment, Nora decided to buy some
time to think about what to do. So she said to James,
“It sounds like you saw things you hadn’t seen before
... things that were not really for kindergartners. I’m
glad you told me about your secret.” James smiled and
put his journal away.
After the event was over, there
was a lot for Nora to consider. Why did James decide to
disclose the secret to her and do it through his daily
journal? Why did he choose to focus on the breasts? Did
he know that focusing on them could be seen as
provocative to his teacher or have sexual connotations?
After all, what signifies sex to an adult might mean
something quite different to a five-year-old. Was James
trying to use his drawing to brag and feel more grown up
about his having seen this grown-up program? Or could he
have made his drawing because he needed someone to talk
to about it when he knew he couldn’t reveal it to his
parents because it was a secret? Was he testing Nora to
see if she would get upset or angry, or looking to her
to help him sort the experience out?
Nora began to think about the
issue more broadly than just about James. If James drew
his picture of the “professional wrestling girl” as a
way of talking to an adult about something disturbing he
saw on the screen, as Nora now thought he did, do other
children also need such opportunities to process the
graphic content they are seeing in media and popular
culture? Well, then, whom are they talking to? How often
do children end up seeing things their parents don’t
want them to see and then learn not to talk to adults
about it? And when they do experience the forbidden
fruit, what does it teach them about honesty and deceit
and about the nature of their relationship with the
important adults in their lives?
Finally, Nora started to feel
better about how she had responded to James and realized
she had learned an important lesson for her future
teaching: Whether they’re scared or want to feel
grown-up and impress others with what they’ve seen, this
is the kind of conversation with an adult that children
often need in order to help them deal with the sex and
violence they see. Furthermore, such conversations might
also be used to teach children alternative lessons to
what they’re learning from the screen.
But Nora didn’t leave it there.
She began to think about what should happen beyond the
classroom. What should the role of schools be in helping
children (and their parents) deal with the sexualized
media culture? How was this experience with James
related to debates that were raging around the country
about whether to teach sex education — and, if so, what
kind and when? More particularly, did she have a
responsibility to talk with James’s parents about the
professional wrestling girl episode? If she did talk to
them, would this upset James and make him feel he
couldn’t trust teachers and other adults to help him
deal with scary secrets next time? Or would speaking
with the parents help them connect more positively with
James so that it would be easier for him to use them
next time, rather than his teacher, to talk about what
he’d seen on TV?
Nora was aware of a 2006 Kaiser
Family Foundation report that found that many children
spend more time involved with media than on anything
else but sleeping. So why wasn’t media education part of
the school curriculum? Why didn’t schools see that they
have a vital role to play in helping to influence the
lessons that media are teaching children? Was the push
to teach the “basics” for standardized tests that came
from the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind”
mandate crowding out content that children urgently
needed to work on? If children didn’t have avenues to
deal with their feelings about media content, what
happened to these feelings? Did their involvement with
the disturbing and confusing images and behaviors they
saw distract them from giving their all to traditional
schoolwork?
While there was not one right
or easy answer to most of Nora’s questions, she realized
that the increasing exposure of the children in her
classroom to confusing sexual content was creating new
challenges for her that she needed to take seriously. We
need more teachers like Nora in today’s world!
‘What's a blow job?’
Meghan recounted with obvious distress that her
seven-year-old daughter, Eva, had come home from school
the day before and asked, “Mom, what’s a blow job?”
Meghan’s first impulse was to tell Eva that it wasn’t
something for children, it was for adults, and to
terminate the conversation then and there. But something
about the earnest expression on Eva’s face made Meghan
pause. “Stay calm, stay calm!” she told herself. Then
she asked, “Where did you hear about blow jobs?” Eva
replied that she heard about it at school. Meghan
followed with, “What did you hear about it?” Eva
responded, “It’s sex.” Meghan couldn’t imagine where to
go next with the conversation.
Meghan had always tried to
protect Eva from exposure to violence and sex in the
media. But ever since Eva had entered a large elementary
school with many children who were not as protected as
Eva, Meghan felt she was increasingly losing her ability
to control this exposure. This new episode left Meghan
feeling that things were really out of control. She had
been aware, with some degree of ambivalence, that she
might need to talk with Eva about issues such as oral
sex during the adolescent or even the preadolescent
years. She had heard news reports about incidents of
oral sex in high schools. She had read that several boys
at a private school near Boston were expelled because a
girl had performed oral sex on all of them in the locker
room. More recently, a friend had told her that two
girls at a bar mitzvah had performed oral sex on the bar
mitzvah boy in a bathroom. She certainly was disturbed
by these incidents, but she was utterly appalled that
the subject had come up with Eva at age seven!
Meghan and her husband had
talked about how they wanted to be open and comfortable
with Eva when talking about sex. But they had expected
Eva’s first questions to be about where babies come
from, not this. This was simply not what they had had in
mind! Should Meghan actually describe oral sex? What
could this possibly mean to a seven-year-old? And how
would her explanation affect Eva’s understanding about
sex and relationships between caring adults, both short
and long term? Meghan also didn’t know what to think
about the children who had used the term “blow job” in
Eva’s presence. Where were they getting this language?
What did they know?
You might think that Meghan’s
experience is an aberration. Initially we thought so
too. It certainly isn’t an everyday experience that
parents have with their children. But when we shared
this story with a group of parents at a workshop, a
father excitedly (and seemingly with relief) raised his
hand and said, “The same thing happened with my son.
He’s eight and last week he came home from school
asking, ‘What does it mean to “suck your d---”?’ I
figured we were the only family dealing with this.
That’s why we came to your talk tonight!”
Sexual harassment at
age 5?
Jason got into trouble one day when his
kindergarten classmate Ashley came home from school and
reported to her parents that Jason had told her that he
wanted to “have sex” with her. Ashley’s parents, very
upset, told her she should never play with Jason again,
that he was a bad boy. They then contacted the teacher
and the principal and demanded a meeting with Jason’s
parents. All of the adults involved were concerned about
what might be going on in Jason’s home for him to come
up with such a comment at the age of five. In some
circumstances, such comments from young children can be
an indication of sexual abuse. The principal, a firm
believer in the school’s Zero Tolerance policy that said
any child who committed an act of aggression or violence
was subject to suspension, was considering a brief
suspension to teach Jason that he should never say such
a thing.
Fortunately for little Jason,
the school psychologist met with him before this could
happen. She told him that some people were worried about
what he said to Ashley. She asked him if he would tell
her what he said and what he had wanted to do to Ashley.
Jason instantly burst into tears. He sobbed, “I wanted
to kiss her. I like her. I like her.” This was the first
time anyone had bothered to ask Jason what he meant by
what he said, a potentially damaging error on the part
of the adults. They were all using an adult lens for
interpreting what he said about sex, not a child’s lens.
Often when adults think “sex,” children have something
very different on their minds.
An important question to ask in
this situation is to what degree Jason’s comment grew
out of his efforts to make sense of the messages about
affection, sex, and relationships that he might be
getting every day from popular culture. While it is hard
to answer this question in hindsight, in these times
it’s probably safe to assume that the popular culture
could very well have played a significant role. Had it
not been for the school psychologist, he might have been
punished for doing something he’d learned and
internalized from those messages. Jason, as much a
victim of the sexualized popular culture as Ashley, was
also victimized by the adults’ fear and
misunderstanding.
We can only be grateful that
the psychologist found a way to connect with Jason, to
hear his point of view. We can hope that Jason got the
kind of support he needed to regain his self-confidence
and to learn how to express affection for his peers in
appropriate ways. We also hope that Ashley got help
working through the misguided and disturbing response
she got to Jason’s words from the adults around her.
A highly publicized story about
a first-grader in the Boston area did not have such a
happy ending. A boy was suspended from school for a week
when a girl in his class reported that he touched her
skin inside the waistband of the back of her pants. The
Zero Tolerance policy in his school left no room to take
into account the understanding or possible needs of this
seven-year-old child. Once again, here is a child paying
a high price for the new sexualized childhood and
adults’ reaction to it. And both stories illustrate a
very disturbing trend — as adults get more and more
uptight about how the sexualized environment is
affecting children, they end up ascribing adult intent
to behaviors that would have been interpreted as
“children just being children” in the past.
Premature adolescent
rebellion
The big topic of conversation for Tessa’s
eighth birthday was the upcoming party — a sleepover
with her three best friends and a magic show for
entertainment. Tessa and her father had been learning
magic tricks together and Tessa was excited about this
new skill. Both parents were enthusiastic about the
magic show too, since they had been afraid Tessa would
want to show her birthday guests a DVD for
entertainment. It was always a problem to choose an
appropriate one. At the party, the magic show was a big
hit, and Tessa taught her appreciative friends how to do
the tricks. But later in the evening the bubble burst
for the parents.
After ice cream and cake, the
girls retired to Tessa’s bedroom to get ready for bed.
About a half hour later Tessa’s mother, Kate, quietly
went into the hallway to see how they were doing.
Through the bedroom door, left slightly ajar, she
overheard a conversation that took her breath away. The
girls were talking about what Cassie, a girl in their
class who was not at the party, had worn to school that
day — a midriff shirt that exposed her belly button.
Kendra said, “My mom says I can’t have one. I keep
telling her it’s not fair.” MacKenzie said without
hesitation that her mom let her choose the clothes she
wanted and Kendra’s mom was really mean for not letting
Kendra choose her clothes. Emily agreed. Tessa seemed
not to be participating much. As Kate continued to
eavesdrop, she learned that “the boys like Cassie.” They
chase her on the playground, and one of the boys
actually ran up to her and kissed her! Kate also learned
that the boy is Cassie’s “boyfriend” now, and he likes
her because she’s “sexy.”
The girls talked on and on —
about how it wasn’t fair that Cassie got to wear
whatever she wanted. Even MacKenzie and Emily, who had
shirts that showed off their belly buttons, complained
that they couldn’t wear them to school. Furthermore, the
girls then discussed how they could get their parents to
let them wear these shirts to school. MacKenzie and
Emily gave Tessa and Kendra advice about how they could
bypass their parents by getting their grandparents to
buy them belly button shirts. All the girls agreed that
grandparents often buy things that parents won’t buy.
MacKenzie boasted that she had
seen a copy of the magazine CosmoGIRL! at her teenage
cousin’s house. It showed really skinny models wearing
really short belly button shirts that were “sooooo
cool.” There was even an article on dieting. This led
Tessa to pipe up, proudly announcing that she was on a
diet and that she was going to be really skinny. The
other girls said they were going to go on diets too.
Kate wondered how Kendra, who was in fact somewhat
overweight and had fallen strangely silent, felt about
this discussion.
Kate was stricken. She was
appalled that eight-year-olds were thinking and talking
about such things. She thought that such topics —
worrying about being sexy, skinny, and popular with boys
and trying to figure out how to trick parents — didn’t
emerge until early adolescence at twelve or thirteen.
She wanted to barge into the bedroom and tell the girls
that they were far too young to have such concerns. She
wanted to tell them to go to sleep! But rationally Kate
knew that even if she did march in to voice her
concerns, the issues raised in the girls’ conversation
would not go away. Rather, they would just stay
underground as the girls continued to try to understand
these issues beneath the radar of critical adults.
Many questions were spinning
around in Kate’s head, none very comforting. First, she
wondered about the girls’ envy of Cassie and their
desire to be “sexy” and popular with boys, like her.
Weren’t the girls a little young to be thinking about
themselves and their peers in terms of sexiness bringing
popularity? They were talking about one another and
Cassie as if they were objects who would be judged
entirely by their looks and whether or not their
clothing was sexy. Second, Kate was concerned about the
seemingly strong peer pressure in the group to look a
certain way and to judge themselves and one another by
their success in that narrow effort.
But Kate was most upset that
the children were talking about adults, their parents,
as if they were “the enemy,” opponents who prevented
them from buying and wearing what they needed to be
happy and successful. This seemed like adolescent
behavior to her. Of course, one of the developmental
tasks of adolescents is to separate from their parents
and become more independent as friends and peers play
increasingly important roles. Kate understood this in
theory. But weren’t these children a bit young to be
starting their adolescent rebellion? Was this a
premature adolescent rebellion? Was this the age
compression she had heard about, where issues that used
to be of relevance to older children were moving down to
younger and younger children?
Learning about sex from
the Internet
Connie teaches health education to the fifth-
and sixth-grade children in her school. By the time the
children get to these grade levels, they are generally
quite comfortable discussing personal topics with Connie
and with one another. Still, she meets with the boys and
girls separately a couple of times during the sex
education course, because this helps them be more open
to discussing uncomfortable issues related to sexuality.
Several years ago, a comment from one of the boys in the
boys-only session gave Connie reason to be concerned.
She had been talking with the boys about the idea of sex
occurring in a relationship as an expression of deep
affection between the sexual partners, when a boy named
Gabe jumped in and challenged her by saying, “Well, I
think you don’t need to like the person. I saw sex on
the Internet. My cousin showed me. They just do it
’cause it’s fun, they like it.” A couple of boys seemed
surprised, but a few others said that they had seen it
too and that Gabe was “right.”
On the one hand, Connie was
upset that some of the boys had access to pornography on
the Internet. On the other hand, she considered it a
positive sign that Gabe had felt comfortable enough to
raise the issue with her, and that other boys in the
class seemed interested in the topic. Clearly it had
been very much on their minds and they really wanted to
talk about it. But how did this comment of Gabe’s affect
one of the most basic lessons she had always tried to
teach the children — that sex is a special part of a
relationship between caring adults? Even though she was
a veteran teacher and expert in this area, Connie was
stumped for the right response to comments like Gabe’s.
In subsequent years, and
because of the now ubiquitous access to the
age-inappropriate content on the Internet that many kids
are exposed to, Connie decided to change her approach to
her first boys-only session. “Early on I ask them what
they have seen about sex on TV, in movies, or on the
Internet. Last week, every boy raised his hand when the
issue of having seen ‘sex’ and pornography on the
Internet came up. When I probed to find out more about
what they saw, it was clear that two or three of them
hadn’t seen real pornography, but I think all the others
had! The times have changed very rapidly since Gabe
first raised the issue of pornography on the Internet in
my class, and the issue certainly adds a whole new
dimension of complexity to the work that I do.” Connie’s
realization that she had to bring the media and popular
culture into her discussions about sex was an important
breakthrough. As she began doing this, what Connie
learned about how to lead such discussions (described in
Chapter 6) can help us all become better able to talk
with children about the sex they are exposed to in media
and popular culture.
Meeting the challenge
Did any of these parents’ and teachers’ stories
sound familiar? As you read, what kinds of reactions did
you have? You might be asking, “What’s happening to the
world? This would never have occurred when I was their
age.” Do you wonder what might be going on with your own
children that you don’t even know about regarding sexual
issues? Are you thinking, “How is all this going to
affect my children’s healthy sexual development as they
are growing up? If children at five, six, and seven
years old are doing things like this, what will be going
on when they are tweens and adolescents?” Or perhaps you
feel angry, not with the children who are struggling to
understand sex and sexuality, but at the world that
contributes so negatively to these struggles. Do you
wonder how it got to be like this? Do you worry about
what you can and should do?
Each of these stories has a lot
to do with sex and sexuality. But they also have
implications — that go far beyond sex — for children’s
overall development, attitudes, and behavior. For
example, we see the beginning of a premature adolescent
rebellion as young girls try to figure out how to trick
their parents into buying them sexy clothes so they will
be popular with the boys. We see a clash of cultures
between parents and the media as ten-year-old boys learn
lessons about sex from the Internet that undermine the
lessons about sex in the context of loving relationships
that caring adults are trying to teach. We also see
examples of the objectification of oneself and others as
both girls and boys learn that how you look rather than
who you are determines the value others place on you.
Unfortunately, it’s not a very big leap from this kind
of objectification to a range of unhealthy emotional
consequences such as eating disorders and depression.
There have always been changes
in society from one generation to the next. Parents have
always noticed how their children’s world differs from
the world of their own childhood. But what is happening
now regarding sex and sexuality in the media and popular
culture goes far beyond the changes that have occurred
between other generations in the past. A revolution is
taking place that we need to take seriously. It is a
revolution that is harming our children and harming the
wider community. We must understand this new world in
order to help and protect our children. In order to do
so, we need to have more information and more skills
than our own parents needed. We all want our children to
grow up capable of having healthy and caring adult
relationships in which sex is a part. This is a more
difficult task than it used to be, and we must all work
together to find ways to help our children adapt to a
rapidly changing world. There are no easy answers, but
the first step is to learn about what is going on today.
As James Baldwin said, “Not
everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can
be changed until it is faced.”
Excerpted from “So Sexy So
Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can
Do to Protect Their Kids” by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., and
Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. Copyright © 2008 by Diane E. Levin
and Jean Kilbourne. Excerpted by permission of
Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing
from the publisher.
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A new book by Diane
E. Levin (CCFC co-founder)
and Jean Kilbourne. Get your signed copy with a
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