Last Halloween, Gigi Durham opened her front door to find a five-year-old girl standing on the doorstep. The child was wearing a boob tube, gauze miniskirt, platform heels and glitter eye-shadow. “I’m a Bratz!” she declared. Durham was put more in mind of a child prostitute that she had once seen in Cambodia. There wasn’t that much to choose between the two girls’ outfits.
So begins Durham’s new book, The Lolita Effect, a critique of the modern obsession with prematurely sexualising young girls and a manifesto on how to renounce it. We have all seen this “effect” — the push-up bras for pre-teens, the satin thongs and “Eye Candy” T-shirts, the pink plastic “Peekaboo Pole Dancing” kit that was sold at Tesco, the magazines that tutor girls who have barely started their periods how to pander to an imaginary “he”.
Who would disagree that the “baby-faced nymphet” — perhaps embodied most explicitly by a school-uniformed Britney Spears in the Baby One More Time video — is a regular fixture on the media landscape? What we might disagree on though is how to counteract it. Some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way.
Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires.
Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.
What we should also do, says Durham, is empower them to see how skewed marketing messages manipulate females to reach for impossible standards of beauty — the Barbie body — as the one and only way to be “hot”.
The reason this is peddled globally as the ideal female model is because it is profitable. A billion-pound industry of cosmetics, diet aids, fashion and plastic surgery depends upon it. It is this that makes millions of girls develop, very early in their lives, a false “self”.
“The Lolita effect begins with the premise that children are sexual beings,” says Durham. “As they mature they deserve to be furnished with factual, developmentally appropriate and useful information about sex and sexuality.” She describes herself as a “pro-sex feminist”. “I think sex is a normal and healthy part of life, even of children’s lives. I want my two young daughters — indeed all girls — to grow up unafraid of and knowledgeable about their bodies, confident about finding and expressing sexual pleasure.”
This is not to encourage under-age sex — though she believes that non-coercive sex between teenagers is not automatically harmful and that we shouldn’t always treat it as though it’s the end of the world — but to encourage more public discourse on it. “I think that a lot of girls under 16 have sexual feelings. My belief is that the longer they wait the better they’ll deal with it because the older you are, the more capable you are of thinking through the consequences, where you stand and what you want. But we shouldn’t though be so terrified of the idea that kids are thinking about it because it really is a very normal part of adolescence.”
This week Helen Goddard, a 27-year-old teacher, was jailed for conducting a lesbian affair with a 15-year-old pupil. The pupil was said to have provided much of the impetus for the relationship. While Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, said that this was no excuse and “the fact that [children] are acting out a parody of adult behaviour does not turn them into adults”, others took a more relaxed view.
In yesterday’s times2 Germaine Greer wrote of the affair: “I’m supposed to think that falling in love with people under the age of consent is evidence of deep perversion and vileness, but I don’t. Young people shouldn’t fall in love, you wish they wouldn’t and yet they do, very often . . .”
Indeed some, including the Cambridge law professor John Spencer, propose reducing the age of consent to as low as 13.
Earlier this year an NHS pamphlet aimed at over-14s circulated in Sheffield and caused uproar because it told pupils that they have a right to a good sex life and that enjoyable sex was beneficial to health, adding the rider: “An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.”
Critics called it deplorable. But was it? One of the authors of the leaflet argued that it was merely designed to help build the self-esteem of young people, to help them better resist peer pressure and delay losing their virginity until they are sure that they will enjoy the experience. Isn’t it better to convince kids that it is “uncool” to have bad sex and that you should expect to get pleasure from it than be in a race to break your duck?
Durham, a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Iowa who has two young daughters, says: “I think those goals are admirable. It’s important to stress that sex brings with it rights and responsibilities.” In popular culture, she says, the focus is almost exclusively on man-pleasing. “There is nothing there about girls’ desires, what they might want or how they might want to act in a sexual situation. This is completely missing from all the popular discourse on sexuality: girls have no sexual agency.”
Consider these headlines from teen girls’ magazines that she quotes: “Try out these girl-tested, guy-approved looks!” (Seventeen magazine) and “Cute guys reveal what would make them pick you out of a crowd!” The articles, she says, never point the other way: that is — what boys can do or should do to please girls.
But hold on. Shouldn’t we keep this in perspective? Compared with previous generations, young girls have never been more protected and things are surely improving. Indeed Durham quotes in her book the psycho-historian Lloyd deMause: “A childhood more or less free from adult sexual abuse is in fact a very late historical achievement.”
Durham agrees, but argues that girls are still exploited terribly. The World Health Organisation estimates that 20 per cent of all girls have been sexually molested. “I don’t think we’ve progressed as much as we think.”
We cannot, however, just blame the media for this state of affairs. None of this would happen if people didn’t buy into it. True, says Durham. In fact, studies have shown that parents, teachers and other adults may unconsciously perpetuate the Lolita effect.
Do you? Do you instinctively favour prettier children who meet the Lolita criteria, while reacting negatively to plainer girls with larger bodies? Do you compliment female children on their looks, clothes and hairstyles, sometimes forgetting their achievements in a way you never would to boys?
“I see this a lot . . . when I watch people interacting with children,” Durham says. "People are very quick to praise girls especially for their looks, ‘Oh, how pretty you are/ great dress/ I love your hair today’, those kinds of things. And girls don’t get complimented on their achievements [in the same way that boys do] or at least it’s much more infrequent.”
It’s easily done — we all want our daughters to look lovely, not least, if we’re honest, because a compliment to them is a vicarious one for us. Durham says that we can combat such effects by focusing much more on their achievements — on what they do creatively, in sport, for the environment, for charity — rather than how they appear. Magazine covers, she says, hardly ever feature images of young female writers or athletes, but of models and actresses, fortifying the message that looks are everything.
We can help to make girls media-literate, teach them the lies of the airbrush, engage little girls in discussion about why it’s awfully dated that Disney princesses always need a man to rescue them, send e-mails and letters to companies that use images that we find unacceptable and tutor girls in how to challenge the mythical male gaze which is so often ill-informed about what boys really “want” anyway.
How many heterosexual men do you know who genuinely think stick thin women are the ideal? Granted, much of the time women are dressing and dieting to impress other women but as Durham says, we are checking each other out through the lens of the imaginary male gaze.
Girls adopt the so-called male critical eye and are becoming aware of it from as young as age 8.
Durham’s view is that after the 1970s feminist movement, which promoted freedom of female sexual expression, something seems to have gone into reverse — and the driving force behind this is turbo-consumerism.
It is hugely profitable for women to spend huge amounts of money chasing an unachievable beauty standard under the guise of empowerment because it is just that — unachievable — and so the beast is never sated.
There is a deep commercial investment in young girls’ bodies. But not boys’ bodies, which is why the fashion is not to flaunt male flesh but to cover it up in comfortable, baggy, loose-fitting clothing: the polar opposite to female young fashion.
It is very important, she says, for marketers to glamorise and fictionalise sex, offering a nefarious mixed message: “Be sexy but not sexual. Flaunt your sexuality IF you’ve got it, but don’t act on it.Attract male attention but fend off sexual advances . . . Good girls, according to the Lolita effect, don’t feel desire, but they need to transmit the playful message that they are ‘sluts’ or ‘hotties’ as their glittering T-shirts attest.”
Young women enjoying sex as equals is not titillating to marketers and it is not profitable, because then no one would be running out to buy slimming drinks and booking cosmetic surgery. But if we do not help our children analyse and reject these mores, remind them that sex is healthy and there to be enjoyed, then we allow Lolita to flourish.
The abstinence-only message doesn’t help either by focusing only on the negatives and the risks, leaving “girls scared to death of admitting that they have sexual feelings, and with no place to acknowledge normal sexual feelings”.
What Durham advocates in her book, which she describes as a feminist manifesto, is to find a way to think about sex separately from money and with young girls perpetually cast in the man-pleasing role. “Can we move to a place where we can consider sexuality as a human impulse that’s about ethical relationships between people and not just something that generates profit?”
In other words let’s not focus not on the imaginary He but the actual Her.
The Lolita Effect by M.G. Durham , £7.99 in paperback, published by Duckworth.
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