It may be true that eighty is the new sixty and one hundred is the new dead. But such innovative formulas aren't funny when looked at from the other end of the lifespan. Why, for example, is six the new sexy and twelve the new twenty?
Walk through any mall in America and I guarantee you'll see some disturbing trends in merchandising. Children's stores now sport infant wear that says things like "Sexy" on their six months' size undershirts while T-shirts for the pre-teen set offer slogans like "Eye Candy" and thong underwear with "Who needs credit cards?" scrawled across the crotch. There are push-up bras and pull-in pants and high-heeled sandals for eight-year olds. Several years ago Tesco (the British version of K-Mart) actually launched a Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, a play set meant to help young girls "unleash the sex kitten inside." Concerned parents got the play set removed from the toy section of the megastore, but Tesco kept the product on the market.
Take a look at advertising too. Younger and younger girls are now the target audience for increasingly sexualized sales pitches for everything from fancy footwear to cheesy cosmetics. Messages underscore sexuality and the need to be "hot", thin, scantily clad, overly made-up, and preferably white. All this while avoiding the behavior of a "slut."
Writing in her book The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Co About It, M. Gigi Durham points out that Marilyn Monroe was twenty-seven years old when she starred in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," making her America's most well-known sex symbol. Sophia Loren was twenty-three in "Desire Under the Elms." In contrast, Brooke Shields was twelve when she played a child prostitute in "Pretty Baby," and Jodie Foster was fourteen when she appeared in "Taxi Driver."
Writing in The Guardian last year, Durham said "increasingly, young girls are seen as valid participants in a public culture of sex. " The highly sexual poses imply they are Lolitas -" knowledgeable, wanton, seductive. It sends a message that little girls should be viewed as sexy."
Lolita, of course, was not a seductress. She was the innocent adolescent victim of prurient pedophilia by her stepfather, Humbert Humbert, in Nabakov's acclaimed novel. "The Lolita Effect" says Tana Ganeva writing in AlterNet "has become the way our culture and our corporate media have constructed little "Lolitas" by sexualizing them and constructing them as legitimate sexual actors when they aren't."
Some analysts see this disturbing trend as a backlash against feminism. At a time of increased economic power and autonomy among educated women, men, they say, feel threatened. Sexy little girls reassure them that the ideal woman is docile, compliant, obedient -" and one-dimensional.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).