Nightmare in girl world

“At my 21st, I want people to say “Here comes one hot chick!”

So declared a 14-year-old schoolgirl in a class discussion a few years ago.

My job at the time was to explore the topic of self-worth and “relationships” with a large group of private school girls. I proposed that we visualise ourselves seven years hence, and this was the first answer.

Then it hit me like a pole-dancer’s kick. That despite her tender age, this girl’s dumbed down, sexed-up aspirations were a set-piece, not only of her generation, but of her mother’s and even of the primary-aged girls, posing their Bratz dolls and rocking to raunchy Beyonce videos at slumber parties.

I said “Really! So you DON’T want your friends to say: ‘there is my friend who re-watered the outback ... or found the cure for breast cancer … or is simply such a great friend?’ You want them to think you are a piece of take-away meat?”

Somewhere on the way from Emily Pankhurst and even Germaine Greer, the feminist revolution had hung a dismally sharp U-turn.

There have been a few acute and savage exposés of this cultural underbelly for women in recent years. Wendy Shalit’s Return to Modesty, Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs are notable for their analysis of the pervasive “raunch” culture underlying American colleges, workplaces and the “image industry”.

In Australia, there is a tide of anxiety rising in parents, teachers and health professionals who care about young girls and teenagers. It is clear to them that the sleaze culture has a taste for ever younger tidbits. But the anxiety is coupled with a sense of powerlessness and a frazzle of political and moral uncertainty. Is more sexual freedom and “information” the solution? Does “artistic” expression extend to the recruitment of the playground? How can we resist without sounding like prudes?

Already in its second printing after its September release, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (Spinifex, Melbourne 2009) comes (at last) an incisive, eloquent and original collection of essays which are a formidable social force coming together from a surprising range of professional and philosophical positions in one publication.

Melinda Tankard Reist, women’s advocate and writer, is the guiding force, editor and a key contributor to this collaboration, which she calls a “collective shout” against the “pornification of childhood”.

In our discussion recently, I suggested to her that the book was important, because it connected some of the causational dots between so many troubling issues: from corporate greed, shock jock artists, unregulated advertising, child eating disorders, internet and telephone porn, cyber-bullying and the increasing accounts of child-on- child sexual assault and violence.

She said she was pleased with the readiness of each contributor, whether activist or academic to join the project. Getting Real consists of 15 essays, with writing by actress Noni Hazlehurst; the comedian turned activist Julie Gale; feminist academics Renate Klein and Abigail Bray; public intellectual Clive Hamilton and author of Corporate Paedophilia, published by the Australia institute, Emma Rush; psychologists and psychotherapists Louise Newman, and Betty McLellan; US anti-trafficking activist Melissa Farley; parenting expert Steve Biddulph and other contributors. It comes with strong endorsements from an equally diverse range of prominent figures.

“The women of Spinifex Press have also been so passionate about this book and about the injustice done to young women and little girls through the pornification of their expectations, imaginations and self- images” Melinda said.

“Despite the diversity of the writers, we all agreed that opposition to the hyper-sexualisation of girls deserved a strong and united front. The time was also well past that such a protest should be dismissed by calling it the cry of an outdated or marginalised prudish ‘moral minority’,” she added.

One of the most striking features of Getting Real is the balance it strikes between the confronting and grim evidence of the widespread cultural abuse of children and the biting humour and satire used by some of the writers. I put to Melinda that the work represented a new type of “protest wit” which was a method likely to take some off guard.

“Yes, some of the writing in this book is shocking. The “pornified messages” and accounts of pro-rape websites are disturbing and should be. Some of the material is only the rallying together of images depicted publicly on our billboards every day. We thought our audience deserved to hear the truth,” she said.

“I also admit it is the feisty humour that keeps this material from really messing with your head,” she laughed, adding “Judy Gale, for example is a professional comedian who has turned her skills to her amazingly effective activism. She exposes the display of illegal porn in places like milk-bars and service stations.

Her grass-roots, “act-locally” approach and her humour exposes the value system of pornography, confront the CEOs of multinational companies and gets results all at the same time”.

Tyranny of silence

The authors of Getting Real are not shy in naming some of the interests that have attempted to put down and shame the impact of the book’s “collective shout” on behalf of girls.

Melinda Tankard Reist is only too aware of the predictable indignation her work provokes among those she calls the “sexual assault libertarians”. She has made a professional specialty of busting the hegemony of silence which cripples discussion of important moral and social issues in modern liberal society.

Her two previous books on post-abortion harm and grief, Giving Sorrow Words (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2003) and Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Spinifex, 2007) and many of her published opinion pieces are testimonies of this.

She notes, “In this book I mention and make fun of some of the anonymous and vindictively personal hate mail that I have received.

“Even more importantly, some of our authors make a full frontal critique of the notion of freedom adopted by these self-styled libertarians, who use the weapon of ‘freedom of speech’ to deny speech to everyone else.”

One of the most probing of these essays is by the Dr Abigail Bray, who analyses the apparent immunity with which the so called “arts” can perpetrate the pornification of girl children.

Bray’s “Gaze that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Bill Henson and Child Sexual Abuse Moral Panic” analyses the language and tactics used in the recent controversy surrounding photographer Bill Henson’s recruitment and exposure of naked girls.

She writes: “We need to unmask the political ‘innocence’ of artists such as Henson and, more broadly, of a culture that trades on the sexual commodification and humiliation of girls. Far from offering girls new forms of social power, the sexualisation of girls is imposing a new tyranny of compulsive and desperate sexual participation.”

Betty McLellan’s contribution links political silencing to the personal acquiescence of girls in their own sexual mis-use, countering the disingenuous liberal cry that all that is needed is that parents “turn the channel” or avert their gaze.

She and many of the other writers argue that the rhetoric of the sexual revolution has hijacked the feminist revolution.

Noni Hazlehurst writes with considerable poignancy that the widespread super-sexualisation of girls is evidence of the compliance and confusion within today’s would-be feminists: “It saddens me that many young women who call themselves feminists, and who hold positions of public influence, are acting as apologists for the very agents of iniquity that have fuelled my anger.”

Betty McLellan adds: “We suggest that the increasing focus on sex and sexiness is not so much a matter of personal preference but pressure coming from people and institutions in society with the power to shape the way others think and feel.”

Getting Real argues that pornography is built on and primes deception and self-deception. Writes McLellan again: “In a sexualised society, women and girls are required to live out a pornographic idea of the female ...” and this provides the personal and cultural construction of false sexual expectations in men, women and children, abusive relationships, destructive self-worth, degrading sexual experimentation. “It makes equality impossible.”

Toxic porn and boys

Tankard Reist comments: “This denial of the real humanity of women has seeped down into the cultural world of girls as young as six or younger. This grooming for sexual consumption - the Lolita Effect - has been further powered by advances in technology.”

“We see the toll in ever younger boys. I feel especially for boys, for whom pornography, via the PC and phone, is so instantly available and which becomes their hand-book for personal sexual attitudes and behaviour.

Renate Klein writes that pornography is only “a click away”:

Research shows that in some communities 70 per cent of boys have viewed violent and deviant pornography by the ages of 12-13; nearly 100 per cent by the age of 18.

Studies are also showing that the formative male brain is seriously imprinted by such degrading pornography, and it alters the boys’ sense of reality and feeds their acting out of aggressive behaviour towards girls.

One horrifying web-site we discovered, encourages young men to carry out coercive sexual attacks on women, by first doping them or making them drunk.  The site then invites these same young men to post photos of their deeds with bragging comments.

How are these sites acceptable in our society? They provide evidence of crime scenes not of sexual freedom.

Many girls felt ripped off in their sexual encounters, finding out early that sex has become the primary currency of personal interaction. “Set amidst the toxic culture all around them, girls simply become sexual crash dummies for boys rather than true intimates and equals. They are led to believe that providing oral sex at parties is the way to be wanted by boys,” Tankard Reist says.

“This cheap and nasty experience of sex, if not downright violent and dangerous, does not encourage either the expectation of all the other dimensions of sexual experience that are truly human. Tenderness and intimacy are lost.”

Getting Real identifies not only the role corporations, advertisers and publishers have in feeding and charging up the insatiable nexus between the titillation and expectation within the culture.

It also links the sexualisation of girls to the medicalisation of beauty and what Renate Klein calls the “sickness industry”.

Klein writes: “Sexualisation has already made (young women) dissatisfied with their ‘outside’ bodies, medicalisation now colonises their ‘inside” bodies’ making young women the ‘perfect material’ for the normalisation of the Big Pharm interests such as the normalisation of chemical abortion and contraception, plastic surgery and even anti depressants.”

She adds, “this is where capitalism meets and exploits liberal feminist dreams of girl power”.

In Getting Real, Steve Biddulph writes: “We know intuitively, and sometimes from bitter experiences of our own, that if you hurt someone’s sexuality you hurt their soul.”

Getting Real and its contributors provide an urgently needed book, filled with wise and sharp insights into the recovery of the soul of our own society. Its contents may leave us horrified and ashamed, but its aim is to make us act.