The Pornification Of Girlhood

A most disturbing article from Quadrant:

...Trends in popular culture, the insidious creep of the cult of bodily perfection, the dominance of fad diets, billboards and magazines depicting flawless female forms, all play a part. Then there’s the commercial interests of companies marketing the promise of success in life through the bowling-ball breasts preferred by readers of Zoo.

Another significant factor is that the movement for women’s equality was overtaken by the movement for sexual licence—the sexual revolution. To be free has come to mean the freedom to wrap your legs around a pole, flash your breasts in public, girls-gone-wild style, or perform acts of the oral variety on school- boys at weekend parties in lieu of the (as traditionally understood) goodnight kiss.

IN AN AGE OF “Girl Power”, many girls are feeling powerless. They are facing unprecedented social pressure, their emotional and psychological well-being at risk in ways never before imagined.

To quote Brumberg, “More than any other group in the population, girls and their bodies have borne the brunt of twentieth-century social change, and we ignore that fact at our peril.” Part of that social change is the wallpapering of society with sexual imagery:

“We have backed off from traditional supervision or guidance of adolescent girls; yet we sustain a popular culture that is permeated by sexual imagery, so much so that many young women regard their bodies and sexual allure as [their] primary currency.”

This puts girls at risk. “Many young women … do not have the emotional resources to be truly autonomous or to withstand outside pressures from peers and boyfriends, whom they desperately want to please.” Psychologist and therapist Mary Pipher shares Brumberg’s concerns. In Reviving Ophelia (1994), she writes:

“girls are having more trouble now than they had thirty years ago … Girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture … as they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected.”

Girls are endangered by those with a keen desire to break down taboos that previously helped keep them out of harm’s way. The American Psychological Association (APA) quotes D.L. Tolman’s Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (2002):

“in the current environment, teen girls are encouraged to look sexy, yet they know little about what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires, and to make rational and responsible decisions about pleasure and risk within intimate relationships that acknowledge their own desires. Younger girls imbued with adult sexuality may seem sexually appealing, and this may suggest their sexual availability and status as appropriate sexual objects.”

Girls are “being invited to see themselves not as healthy, active and imaginative girls, but as hot and sassy tweens on the prowl”, write Andrea Nauze and Emma Rush in Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia (2006). Fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus of Hannah Montana fame was simply following the script expected of her as a celebrity adolescent when she posed, topless and half-wrapped in a silky sheet, for Vanity Fair, with post-coital bed hair and ruby lips.

THE PRESSURE TO CONFORM to an idealised body type in a sex-saturated culture that values girls who are thin, sexy and “bad” is taking a massive toll. Despite the many opportunities available to them, girls today are struggling. Courtney E. Martin observes in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007) that self-hatred has become a rite of passage for teenage girls, pointing to “the frightening new normalcy of hating your body”. These girls may be good at lots of things. But that doesn’t really matter if their bodies are not like the images of thin airbrushed celebrities and models who are in their faces every day. Life seems to have become one big beauty pageant.

The body has become a project that a girl has to work on full-time. If she stops to even take a breath, she might gain weight. Too many girls are trying to imitate half-starved celebrities, and are obsessed with trying to conform to impossible-to-attain highly sexualised images. Some sobering statistics:

A Mission Australia national survey (2007) of 29,000 young people aged eleven to twenty-four found that body image was the most important problem for them—ahead of family conflict, stress, bullying, alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health found that between 40 per cent and 82 per cent of young women were dissatisfied with their weight and/or shape.

Close to 20 per cent of adolescent girls use fasting for two or more days to lose weight. Another 13 per cent use vomiting. Others rely on slimming pills, chewing but not swallowing food, smoking and laxative abuse, as found in the 2006 National Youth Cultures of Eating Study.

One in 100 adolescent girls suffers anorexia.

An estimated one in five is bulimic.

One in four teenage girls wants to have plastic surgery, according to reports in August last year.

Body Image Dissatisfaction (BID) is associated with emotional distress, obsessive thinking about appearance, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, depression, poor self-esteem, smoking and poor eating practices.

Some magazines for young girls claim they want to address the limited range of bodies shown in their magazines. For example, Girlfriend has what it calls a positive body image policy. Yet the Girlfriend editors also admit to digitally enhancing the women in its pages—including their own staff—with Photoshop.

Girlfriend says it wants to cater for women who are above a size 8, so it includes “large” women such as Scarlett Johansson, Kate Winslet, Beyoncé Knowles and Jessica Simpson. Well, that’s going to make average women everywhere feel better. Women with one or two curves and without a scarecrow profile are permitted coverage, provided they are extremely famous and beautiful—and not too “large”.


THE 2007 REPORT of the APA taskforce on the sexualisation of girls links the objectifying and sexualising of girls and young women with three of the most common mental health problems suffered by them: eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression. Yet objectification is reinforced through embedded sexual content everywhere you look. According to the APA, “A culture can be infused with sexualised representations of girls and women, suggesting that such sexualisation is good and normal.” This leads to girls and women feeling bad about themselves:

“there is evidence that sexualisation contributed to impaired cognitive performance in college-aged women, and related research suggests that viewing material that is sexually objectifying can contribute to body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, low self-esteem, depressive affect, and even physical health problems in high-school-aged girls and in young women.
“In addition to leading to feelings of shame and anxiety, sexualizing treatment and self- objectification can generate feelings of disgust toward one’s physical self. Girls may feel they are “ugly” and “gross” or untouchable …”

The clearest evidence of pornography’s insidious take-over of the public space is billboards containing highly sexualised images of women and other forms of sexual messaging. Most complaints are dismissed by the Advertising Standards Board, which patronisingly implies that complainants are simply hung up about discussing sex with their children. The membership of the Board includes Catharine Lumby, who defends Hustler’s creator Larry Flynt as simply “bad taste”. Lumby has also provided evidence in support of Adultshop’s case for the loosening of restrictions on X-rated films.

Pin-ups in the office or workplace have been found in various cases in Australia to constitute sexual harassment. Why is it then that giant pin-ups in the public space do not? Dr Lauren Rosewarne asks this question in her 2008 book Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy. Dr Rosewarne highlights how the signs and symbols of pornography are now enmeshed in popular culture:

“While pin-up images are prohibited in a workplace, outdoor advertisements, which may contain references to pornography, are freely displayed … pornography can be interpreted as being one of the most potent contemporary influences on advertising … such advertisements are helping normalise pornographic images by displaying them in places where they are unavoidable and thus encouraging the acceptance of them. This process is known as mainstreaming … explicit sexual expression has become naturalised.”

So complete is the migration of images from porn into everyday advertising that an ad for hamburger company Bite Me features a woman in red bustier, her mouth perfectly rounded and amazed like a sex-doll, with meat spilling everywhere and tomato sauce splotched above her breast, all reminiscent of the classic porn “money shot”.

The Brisbane Times, after publishing an article titled “Beauties brave brazilian wax” in June last year, asked readers which they preferred, “bald” or “au naturel”? It gave lots of men the opportunity to rhapsodise about why they liked to have a “good perv” and didn’t like hair caught in their teeth.

Not long ago the Age embedded on its home page a video clip of a porn industry award show in the USA, with writhing porn stars grinding away, easily accessible for anyone visiting the Age online for a school project. The Age Life&Style blog “Ask Sam” ran a story, “Is porn making men too picky” in April 2008. It attracted forty pages of posts, most from porn devotees, including one man who declared, “porn is fantastic … hardcore is the way to go”.

This stuff is rife on television too. SBS screened the British documentary “Obscene Machines” in June 2005, repeated in April 2007. This film depicted women being penetrated by giant mechanical dildos with names like The Monster, The Intruder, The Probe, The Snake and The Trespasser. It also featured an older man showing us how he had sex with a life-size sex doll called Emma. Emma is wearing school uniform.

It was rated M15+. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found in February this year (almost a year after the film was screened the second time—it got away with it the first time) that it breached the code of practice. There were no penalties, no fines. SBS must have been trembling when it received ACMA’s letter.

It is often said that young people have to go “searching” for porn. More often now, it seems that the porn is searching for them, so ubiquitous and commonplace has it become...

Read it all.