In ‘Girl Slavery in America’, a recent post published on Huffington Post, Executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, Malika Saada Saar, highlights (like this earlier piece I published) that there is a marketplace for the bodies of girls in the West as well as other parts of the world.  She also makes the very important point that it is not the girls who are victims of the prostitution trade who should be penalised, but the men who fuel demand for them in the first place.

…Unfortunately, in both urban and rural regions of the nation, American-born girls are being trafficked and sold. An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. According to the Department of Justice, the average age of a prostituted girl in the U.S. is 12-14 years. These sexually exploited girls are routinely raped, beaten into submission, and even tattooed like cattle by their pimps.

…we must …stem the demand for buying and selling girls for sex.

Men who purchase girls for sex are committing child abuse. They are not simply paying for sex; they are instead perpetrating brutal acts of rape against vulnerable children who do not choose to sell their bodies. No child wants to be sold for sex.

It is time to prosecute those who sell and purchase girls. If they are subject to punishment for their criminal acts against children, pimps and “johns” will be less interested in the marketplace of very young girls. The laws already exist—but there is minimal political will, at the state or federal level, to prosecute them–especially the “johns”. Despite all the political jingoism about being tough on crime or protecting our children, lawmakers are remarkably indifferent to prosecuting these child abusers.

How is it that in our nation, in the 21st century, any one of our daughters can be bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and without the severe threat of punishment? What is happening that girls’ lives are worth so little? In the context of a civilized society, this level of tolerated violence against girls is an irreconcilable contradiction. No girl in America should be purchased, sold, raped, abused or exploited — and with impunity. Read article here.

Anne Summers review of Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism was published in the Australian’s Review section on the weekend.

In the review, titled ‘The tyranny of self-perfection’, the long-time Australian feminist campaigner for women’s equality admits she had “no idea” about how bad things were for girls in a hypersexualised culture:

…This reviewer has to confess a comparable ignorance….I had no idea.

For feminists such as me who have been preoccupied with statistics and watching public indicators of progress such as women breaking barriers in politics, in business and other public domains, the cultural revolution that has enveloped girls and young women during the past decade or so was completely off my radar.

I kept fobbing off questions about whether I thought raunch culture was incompatible with feminism: how relevant was that, I thought, compared with the important stuff….?

So Walter’s book was quite an eye-opener.

She documents a culture in which sexual allure is equated with empowerment and girls are driven to strive for an air-brushed perfection that is as artificial as it is unattainable. Every aspect of the culture seems to reinforce this message, from the normalisation of the sex industry via the explosion of lap-dancing clubs throughout Britain to magazines directed at girls that “relentlessly encourage their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrities whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational.”

Girls today, says Walter, think sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having and will do anything to achieve the mandated appearance… the information I found most distressing was how young women feel obliged to shape themselves according to the expectations of the idealised female their boyfriends have acquired from pornography…

All this is especially germane because 10 years ago Walter wrote a book The New Feminism that argued that feminists should not be concerned about the growing sexual objectification of women…Walter has now changed her mind. Big time.

Summers goes on to say that she finds the material in Walter’s book “sobering” and “challenging”.

While I find it somewhat difficult to understand how so many prominent women actively working to raise the status of women failed to notice  the wrecking ball impacts of a pornified culture which constricts the freedom of women and girls by reducing them to sexy dolls while dressing it all up as ‘choice’, I am glad they see it now.

But while Summers started so well, her conclusion is unfortunate – and wrong.

She writes: “No one — not Walter, not me — wants to be thought a prude, so no one is going to actually take on the hypersexualised culture that is supposedly spoiling the life chances of girls today…”

Summers had “no idea”, as she says, about what was happening.  But is seems she also has “no idea” about the global movement against it.

No one is going to take on the hypersexualised culture? That’s a big call and contradicted by the facts.

There are many of us who have taken it on. Some key players appear in my book Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls (one of a number of books on the subject in recent years, including Living Dolls, The Sexualisation of Childhood, The Lolita Effect, So Sexy So Soon, Pornified, What’s Happening to Our Girls?, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Bodies, etc). Then there’s  Kids free 2B Kids, the Australian Council on Children and Media, The Australian Childhood Foundation, Choices for Children, and the dynamic new counter cultural agitator movement Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (www.collectiveshout.org).

Then there are individuals who have come together to lobby for change, including Julie Gale, Maggie Hamilton, The Hon Alistair Nicholson, Steve Biddulph, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Noni Hazlehurst, Professor Clive Hamilton, Dr Emma Rush, Professor Louise Newman, Dr Cordelia Fine, Dr Renate Klein and others.  We are all part of a global movement against sexualisation/objectification, led overseas by activists, advocates and academics such as Dr. Jean Kilbourne, Dr Diane Levin, Professor Gail Dines, Professor Ros Gill, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, Dr Melissa Farley, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood in the US, Object and Pink Stinks in the UK, and many others. The American Psychological Association’s Taskforce on the sexualisation of girls took the issue on, with a major report, and more recently, the UK Home Office, with a compelling examination of the problem.

Propelled by evidence of harm, all have acted together to bring about change. They haven’t given a stuff about being labelled “prudes” or anything else, recognising the vested interests at play that would try to shut them down.

Given the major battles Summers has engaged in over decades, I would have thought she was made of sterner stuff.

Today, two guest posts which are critically important contributions to the recent push for compulsory child weigh-ins and other interventions to supposedly reduced childhood ‘obesity’. The first by a Melbourne writer, (who asked that her real name not be used but who is known to me), who says poignantly: “When my parents started weighing me, I was already sensitive about my weight. Their efforts only served to create a punishing lifelong obsession”. The second is a re-print of another personal piece on the same issue – also profoundly expressed - by Elizabeth at My Spilt Milk.

To weigh, or not to weigh? In an age of fear and media hype about childhood obesity, it’s a loaded question. A parent myself, I understand anxiety about our children’s health. And in an image-saturated culture where ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ seems woefully antiquated, I fully understand how we turn ourselves inside out with worry about how the world will treat our precious charges.

In a recent post on Mia Freedman’s blog, ‘Obesity: Helping your family’s health by making them hit the scales‘,  Freedman shares a story about ‘Val’, friend of comedian Wendy Harmer. After noticing one of her children has gained a few kilos, Val decides that getting each family member to regularly step on the scales is the best way to keep them honest, and trim. Freedman admires Val’s ‘no-nonsense’ attitude to weight control. I’m afraid I don’t share her enthusiasm.

There’s a world of difference between the way an adult with healthy body image might process that message, and a child who may be anxious about their weight. Then there’s the question of what each child’s ‘healthy weight’ actually is at any stage of their development. And then there’s the issue of how we teach kids about moving their bodies, and making good food choices – without making too big a deal out of it. And I’m quite sure that scales don’t have much to offer any part of the problem.

Most mornings of my life between the ages of eight and fourteen, I was weighed by my parents. Like Val, they felt I was gaining weight and worried that I’d get fat. Like most parents, they wanted to teach me about healthy eating and weight control, and save me from the cruelty that other kids can dish out. And they thought they could achieve all this by keeping close tabs on my weight.

They began to scrutinise every piece of food that came anywhere near me. Weigh-ins became a lecture or praise, depending on my result. At one stage, I was taken to evening weight loss groups, where my weight was recorded on a card and grown women smiled at me with sympathy. They told the eight-year-old me that it was good I was starting early: I wouldn’t get a boyfriend unless I was slim. But seeing as I was growing, not shrinking, and the number on the scales reflected this, I very quickly learned to see my weight as a measure of how badly I was failing at life.

It wasn’t that my family ate poorly. My father was a health fanatic, and my mum cooked good, nutritious food. It was just that my body was doing things my parents didn’t trust. And because I wanted to please them by producing a better number on the scales, I became anxious about starving myself whenever I could. I really wanted to have a better body, the right body: one my parents would like.

The more control my parents exerted, the more out of control my eating became. To curb my adolescent hunger at age 12, my mother took me to the GP for appetite suppressants. At one point, food was locked away. And then there were the occasional school weigh-ins. Those days I felt so sick with fear and burning shame I’d want to run away so I wouldn’t be forced to hand my peers more ammunition, or show them exactly how heavy a failure I was.

My eating was chaotic: starving to be ‘good’, then bingeing in secret, doused in self-hatred and shame. I’d eliminate fat, then carbohydrates, and meticulously record all calories and fat grams in neat columns. I’d calculate percentages of calories derived from fat and every day aim for decreasing totals of each. I’d obsessively exercise, chain-smoke and drink black coffee to avoid eating. I’d spit food into the bin instead of swallow it. And the scales became a punishing ruler: I’d weigh myself dozens of times a day, filled with fear over what the number would say each time.

When I finally reached ‘thin’, my parents’ control over my eating finally stopped. But when the nervousness in their voices told me it was time to stop, that I’d lost enough weight, I can’t deny a dirty sense of satisfaction. No, I’d keep going, thanks. This is what you wanted.

While it was true that age eightI had begun to gain a little weight, it was called ‘puberty’. Despite everything, until my mid-teens I was a healthy weight – if a bit heavier than most girls my age. That makes sense. I’m also quite a tall woman, muscular, broad-shouldered and physically strong. I look scrawny at 70 kilograms. And I often wonder what might have happened if, instead of reacting with fear, my parents had responded thoughtfully to my growing body.

If my parents had recognised that my body shape was more like my grandmother’s than my older sisters, would my weight have stabilised, found its natural place? If my parents had never let the scales dictate their emotions, would I never have let them rule mine? Would I have learned how to respond appropriately to the hunger signals of my growing body? I was never given the chance.

I’ve no doubt my parents thought they were doing the right thing, keeping tabs on the number on the scales, carefully watching every mouthful, joking about my fat knees and muffin top. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Parents have no way of knowing exactly how any child might respond to overt attempts to control their weight. In the end, we need to ask if the interventions we plan for our children are going to do more harm than good. We need to see the red flags ahead, and slow down. We need to respond, instead of react.

A recent Mission Australia survey indicated that body image tops the list of young Australians’ concerns – and this anxiety over our bodies is starting early. It would be the rare child that doesn’t listen up and listen hard to how our culture views people who are heavier than most. We mete out harsh and relentless punishments to those whose bodies don’t fit our mould, and we say we’re doing it for their own good. But we’re agonisingly slow to learn that shaming people about their weight and relationship with food just doesn’t work.

Despite my parents’ best efforts (and mine), I didn’t stay thin. And I’m quite sure my body didn’t turn out as it was meant to. I’ve now lost and gained weight over a sixty-kilogram range, and I’m still technically ‘obese’. In attempting to change my body shape to suit our cultural preference for thinness,’ I’ve told myself how stupid, worthless, hopeless, disgusting I am. I’ve starved and binged more times than I can count. I’ve had substances injected into me I can’t even identify. And all of this simply because I learned very early that my body was wrong, and needed to be controlled. I was taught to pursue a body type I could never achieve, nor maintain.

In a recent submission to US First Lady Michelle Obama, author and dietician Ellyn Satter wrote:

“Research shows that children who are labeled overweight or obese feel flawed in every way – not smart, not physically capable and not worthy. Parents who fear obesity hesitate to gratify their child’s hunger for fear s/he will get fat. Such labeling is not only counterproductive, it is unnecessary.”

I couldn’t have said it better. I am an accomplished woman, with gifts and talents I am very proud of. I’ve raised beautiful children, and fought my way back from post-traumatic stress disorder and post-natal depression. Every day I work hard to overcome the limitations these, and other traumas, have put upon my life. And yet, there’s not one waking hour that I don’t obsess about my weight, my appearance, my body and the food I put into it. There’s not one hour that I don’t wonder how I can starve my way into becoming a more physically ‘acceptable’ human.

When my parents started weighing me, I was already sensitive about my weight. Their efforts only served to create a punishing lifelong obsession.

In subjecting her kids to a regular session on the scales, Val may think she’s making a light-hearted joke. She may not think she’s making a big deal out of her children’s weight and appearance. But will her kids perceive it that way? If they’re anything like me, they might just learn the damaging message that they’re only as good as their last weigh-in. They might get the message that their body is wrong, and needs to be controlled. They might learn to feel, like me, flawed in every way.

Scales of Injustice

Now that I donate blood regularly, I am weighed a few times a year. This is the most frequently I have stood on scales in recent memory. It’s been interesting, to me, to note in numbers how my weight has altered (mostly increased) during this period of post-partum body adjustments, depression, medication and other health events. The number on the scale doesn’t mean very much: it is a number. It would seem very high to some, but then, I know that my dense body is heavy even when not particularly fat. So I don’t fret. But I can’t share that number with you here, as much as I would like to have that kind of fearless candour. It is still too early in my fat acceptance journey, perhaps. Or maybe it’s because I know what numbers mean to other people.

I know what numbers can do.

Like many people, high school Physical Education classes were not funtimes for me. I was labelled as unfit and unco-ordinated very early on in my school career and thereafter it didn’t seem to matter what I did. If I tried hard to improve my fitness, I was laughed at (mostly by other students: one notable time, by a teacher.) If I dawdled and wheezed, I simply confirmed the stereotype. If I listened too hard, I heard the slurs whispered behind my back as teams were picked or we lined up at the swimming pool, bodies exposed to scrutiny. Sometimes the hostility was overt.

A few times, we were weighed in class and those weights were listed publicly. I remember the trembling shame, and the flooding relief to not be heaviest. I remember the knowledge that I would never be popular until I was thin. But my body doesn’t do thin. It didn’t do acceptable in those formative years any more than it does now.

Kate Moss was it-girl of the moment (how little things change!) and my body, my unwaif-like body, was never going to make it onto the ‘hot’ list. And because I am obstinate and strong, I decided to just bide my time until I could choose to be around less-judgemental peers. But that wasn’t an option for everyone – fad diets were a weekly event for some of the students at my boarding school and I sporadically joined in. I remember telling a friend, mid-diet, that she was perfect how she was, and being laughed at. I was a fat girl, a lost cause, what would I know?

I feel like I need to say here that I wasn’t that fat. I wore straight sizes. I was active. I may have been in the D grade team, but I played sport. But it was apparent to me that in the eyes of my adolescent peers, and also my family, my body was outsized, unattractive and out of control.

My stepmother wasn’t generally big on body shaming but she did worry about my weight. Inconsistency raised me: my parents encouraged me to restrict portions one day, indulge the next. They loved me with food because physical and verbal affection were generally out of their range. And they singled me out from my siblings by making me do extra exercise. A lowlight was when my stepmum publicly informed a few other mothers from my primary school that I had graduated up to adult sizing (something that frequently happens quite suddenly to girls about to hit puberty). They were audibly shocked, no doubt thinking, gosh, I’m glad that hasn’t happened to my daughter yet. It’s twenty years later but their judgement still smarts.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try to control my body. I documented my first serious attempt at a diet in a notebook. I drew up tables and stuck them on the fridge, indicating which days I would be allowed to have dessert. I was eight years old.

Eight is the same age of the daughter of one of the commenters on this post by Mia Freedman about weighing children, and about the age at which most girls are beginning to be aware of their weight. In her post, Freedman asks: “We’re obviously keen not to give our kids any complexes about their weight but does that mean turning a blind eye to weight gain for fear we might say the wrong thing?” Apparently, Freedman accepts the premise that the growth of a child’s or adolescent’s body requires commentary, and that such commentary could actually control that growth.*

The problem with these types of arguments about weighing children to ‘fight childhood obesity’ is that they show little understanding of how diet–weight–health interact: that is, in a far more complex and non-linear way than is popularly believed. A number on a scale doesn’t shout to your body: hey, stop growing as you wish to grow (largely due to genetic factors) and fit neatly onto this chart, dammit! But it may say to the adults around a child: start putting undue scrutiny on this child’s appetite, start singling her/him out for ’special’ exercise or food, start making her/him feel less than for not looking the right way.

What infuriates me most about the idea of frequently weighing children and adolescents – or publicly weighing them – to keep them ‘on track’, is that it singles out the fat kids, and the solid kids, and even the underweight kids. It perpetuates the disproven notion that weight and health are intrinsically linked. I’m all for improving the health of young people. I think reducing our reliance on processed foods and increasing people’s activity levels are admirable goals. But when you aim these goals almost solely at vulnerable people who are already singled out by their appearance and who are already at risk of low self esteem, you do them a huge disservice. And actually you do everyone a disservice. Because thin children need nourishing foods and plenty of fun exercise in the fresh air, too.

More than that, we all need to stop buying into the lie that a single aesthetic ideal is a virtue to strive for, or the answer to everything. It has taken many years to overcome the damage done in PE classes, but finally I don’t much care what the scales tell me. They can measure how much the fluids and tissues of my body weigh. They do not know if I am strong or healthy. They also do not know my worth.

Concerned parents, teachers, public health authorities and popular culture commentators with successful blogs take note: We must not make the mistake of letting some children think that they are worth less — worthless — because they weigh more. Numbers on a scale are not nuanced, they are not intelligent, they are not loving, they do not listen. They are no substitute for real information about health and wellbeing and they are not a parenting tool. Our children deserve so much more.

* N.B. It is common sense that where sudden weight gain is large or coinciding with other symptoms (other than puberty) then that is a good reason for a health check with a good GP, and subsequent discussion. But for a typical increase in chubbiness? For heaven’s sake, children ought to be allowed to just be happy in their bodies. Bombardment with fat-shaming media is never far away so parents aren’t actually required to join in. Besides, shaming children into restricted eating and/or exercising will not make them lose weight – unless it pushes them to starve themselves. For more information on how children can regulate their own food intake and body size, Ellyn Satter is a good starting point.

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend about Kick-Ass, a school holidays film starring an 11-year-old girl who shoots a man in the face, impales another and says things like:

“OK, you c—s, let’s see what you can do now.” The film is described as containing  “scenes of carnage and massacre played for laughs.” Read the article here.

Emma Rush, who co-wrote the Australia Institute reports Corporate Paedophilia: The sexualisation of children in Australia and Letting Children be Children: Stopping the sexualisation of children in Australia  and who I’ve published here before, wrote a response to a piece by Emma Tom in The Australian last weekend. It didn’t get published there, but it will get published here.

It is a matter of grave concern that children continue to suffer sexual abuse, and in large numbers. And it is understandable that survivors such as Emma Tom (The Australian, March 20) have strong opinions about what does and does not cause child sexual abuse. But her suggestion that the sexualisation of children has no impact on the prevalence of child sexual abuse is at odds with the views of Australian leaders in child health, welfare and development. 

Read the rest of this entry »

“I was startled by what some young women were saying to me about their inability to access dissent; their inability to hear voices that were presenting an alternative” – Natasha Walter

I’m half way through Natasha Walter’s new book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is a compelling read, laying bare the forces of sexualisation, objectification and raunch culture and their destructive influence on the health and wellbeing of women and girls everywhere. So much of the book echoes the findings of Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls. It is encouraging to see a coalescing of global concern around the pornification of culture and it’s wrecking ball impact on girls’ lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nice to know I’m not the only one with a negative critique  (also published in On Line Opinion Friday)of the Lady Gaga machine. Here’s an extract from a piece by Jim Schumacher and Debbie Bookchin titled ‘What’s Next From Lady Gaga: A snuff film?’  recently published on Huffington Post:

What if glitzy Lady Gaga is exactly what she appears to be: The latest manifestation of a culture industry that pushes the boundaries of civility and sexuality to the extreme in order to make a buck? And worse, pushes it on our kids long before they want or need to be presented with some middle-aged ad executive’s personal sadomasochistic sexual fantasies?

Read the rest of this entry »

Since my last piece on the cyberbullying taking place through Facebook, other sites targeting girls for their alleged flaws have been found.  One identifying young women not considered  “marriage material”.  Another naming and shaming ‘12-year-old sluts’.  Another for girls labelled “bitches”.  British girl Poppy Bracey recently took her life  as a result of a cyber bullying campaign against her.  Poppy was 13. She was harassed for being “too pretty”. (Some commenting on the story said girls like this just need to toughen up).  It seems no girl can ever be good enough. She must grow up trying to shield herself from virtual darts and real-life abuse, coming at her from every direction.

The piece below by Melbourne blogger Elizabeth (left) at My Spilt Milk  (whose comments I have valued on my  posts), is a passionate exploration of these online monuments to cruelty. Elizabeth nails the hypocrisy of Facebook in banning breastfeeding images while allowing sexualised depictions of women, harrassment and abuse to flourish on untold numbers of sites.

On the weekend – on the eve of International Women’s Day – I wrote about a Facebook slut page, arguing it enabled cyber bullying, stalking and harassment. On the page, photos were posted of girls and women who were labelled ’sluts’. One was 10-years-old. Another had been bashed (she deserved it, she was a slut). A later image showed a woman bound, with her head decapitated. Many were just smiling young women at home or having fun with girlfriends. And so it went on, image after image of girls and women branded with this virtual scarlet letter.

The piece got a run in On Line Opinion today.

It appears that Facebook has responded to criticism. The site has been removed. Thanks to all who reported it.

 Of course, that’s not the last of the bullies. Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education blogged on bullying and social networking sites this week. You can read her piece here. 

 My friend Anita had her own experience with on-line abusers this week, who demanded their entitlement to child pornography. Anita set up a Facebook site to find 3 billion people willing to add their voice to a global campaign against child porn. The site was inundated with comments by men extolling the pleasures of child rape and posting links to child porn. (She has removed them). Please support Anita’s efforts against the production of and demand for child sexual assault images and sign up.  

Below is a comment on my original blog  by Merryn Smith. It’s so good I wanted to give it more prominence.  

“I think the problem with social networking sites and a great deal of internet is that people assume that it merely reflects socio/cultural reality. Actually it produces reality, as does all discourse. So it’s easy to reduce the meanings generated by groups like these as mere ‘words’. Hence men (and a small proportion of young naive girls) always call forth the freedom of speech argument to conceal one of purposes of this type of ‘othering’ discourse. Women are the largest group that are targeted as the ‘other’ inhuman ‘thing’ through this type of ancient discursive act. But of course ethnic groups and the working classes are also kept in place through these ‘othering’ discourses. This is of course about power. The power to dehumanise comes hand in hand with physical acts of violence. But we know that young women suffer terribly high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in our cultures. Yes these groups reflect that, but they also produce a cultural climate and language that condones, encourages and applauds the dehumanisation of half of the worlds population. Of course these groups hide behind notions of freedom and the separation of bodily acts and psychological acts, or body and mind, body and speech. But of course these young men and boys (mostly) are passing through their right of passage-their right to dehumanise woman and girls. This is how men bond. It is through the ‘othering’ process that makes them feel that they belong. We need to fight this by creating spaces for young women where they can ‘go’, real and virtual, where they are not used as a symbol of male belonging and bonding. We need to create spaces where woman and girls (especially girls) can create their own embodied and disembodied world realities. But it aint easy. Happy Women’s Day…”

 

The UK Home Office just released the Sexualisation of Young People: Review by Dr Linda Papadopoulos. It is a compelling, thorough and strongly evidence-based paper which should be read by anyone concerned about the impacts of the pornification of culture on girls and boys. Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls is cited a number of times (the quote above from the Executive Summary is taken from Betty McLellan’s chapter ‘Sexualised and Trivialised: Making Equality Impossible’). It’s good to see our work acknowledged in this significant report.  Given that we share the UK’s cultural DNA, I hope this report will bolster efforts to address this issue here and add momentum to the push for a review of our own Senate Committee inquiry recommendations, which Emma Rush wrote about here earlier. 

See also ‘Clamp down on lads’ mags to avoid ‘pornification’ of society, says study’.  Also have a look at the following articles: ‘Review into sexualisation of young people published’ , ‘Fears over sexual images and children’, BBC, and the Guardian.