Blog I Karen Brooks

The news that a gorgeous little seven-year-old girl, Julia Lira, is to lead the Viradouro samba parade in Rio de Janeiro seems to have tipped the scales of public opinion. Known for its sexually charged atmosphere, the Carnival is really no place for a child. Yet the father defends his right to give his daughter permission to partake, enjoying the publicity and instant global celebrity the family have achieved by such a decision. Meanwhile those who express reservations or protest are spoken of as wowsers.

The decision to include Julia Lira, despite cultural differences and context, is a symptom of what’s happening with increasing regularity in our world: the sexualisation and exploitation of kids. If it’s not for profit, then it’s with an eye to fame – for the parents as well.

Think about Ballon Boy and the lengths to which those parents went to get their faces on TV. It may have backfired, but they didn’t hesitate to use their children to achieve an end. Similarly, those awful tot and tween pageants that are particularly popular in the USA are little more than an exercise in vicariousness on behalf of the parents (usually mums) who indulge in dreadful competitiveness, dressing their daughters like mini-Lolitas and exposing them to a world that they’re too young to be involved in. Now we have a four year old boy, Kayim-Ali Jaffer appearing on Britain’s Got Talent with a Michael Jackson routine and bringing the crowd to its feet. When is it going to end? In-utero talent shows?

It would be so easy, too easy to blame the parents. But there’s a range of social factors that feed into this push to make kids sexy, display their talents, and have them participate in what was once exclusively adult culture. Social factors which mean these types of scenarios will keep recurring.

From padded bras and G-strings for four and five year olds, to Lolitaesque dolls and fashions, to gyrating, scantily clad music idols ala Lady GaGa, sex permeates children’s culture. Caught in this cycle of must-have or must-keep-up parents and kids are buying into the notion that they must look a particular way and own specific things to ‘fit in’ with peer groups.

Wander into your average department store and you’re likely to find miniature versions of adult couture, replete with plunging necklines, diaphanous fabrics, sparkles, spangles and sexiness for kids to don. There are even high heels for tots, bling to drape around their cherubic necks and the piece de resistance, make-up, particularly lip gloss, to smear across those, as yet, naturally pouting lips. There’s T-Shirts with slogans plastered all over them that announce a way of viewing the owner “Tit Man’; ‘Drama Queen’, ‘Spoiled., just to name a few. Not only are they aimed at under eights, they’re also a mixture of sexual inappropriateness and narcissism. Flaws are now turned into positive traits in a society that preaches the right of the individual. Care about ME and I’m ‘Special’ permeate our culture and are, sadly, notions that are instilled in even very young children.

Phillip Adams called this push to commodify chldhood through sex, “Corporate Paedophilia”: that is, when marketeers deliberately set out to exploit a child’s desire to grow up fast by targeting them with images, products and ideas about sex and adulthood – long before their cognitively ready.

An Australia Institute report that came out in 2007 used Adams’ term as its title. Focussing (unfortunately) on a fairly benign David Jones catalogue to discuss the sexualisation of kids, it prompted outrage. There was also a smear campaign directed at the authors. Accused of ‘reading too much into things’ and for fuelling a moral panic, there was an effort to dismiss the concerns raised.

That is, until thousands of parents and other citizens lodged their disquiet. From this, it seems, a grass roots movement began to swell, determined to call the corporations and advertisers to account and in doing so, protect childhood.

Melbourne Comedian (and mother), Julie Gale founded the Kids Free to Be Kids group,

Young Media Australia, (you can get to YMA from KF2BK)

There’s also Melinda Tankard Reist, and many others, who added their voices to the growing throng.

The people behind this aren’t ‘prudes’ nor are they adults wishing to live in an Arcadian past, where girls were made of sugar and spice and poor boys from doggy and creepy-crawly remnants. On the contrary, these are professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists (see also the American Psychological Association’s Report on the Sexualisation of Girls), parents, grandparents, teachers and even young people who are alarmed by the proliferation of sexual imagery and ideas being used to promote and celebrate kinderculture. It doesn’t take Einstein Barbie to understand that not only are their complaints justified, but they may even be far-sighted.

And now, after the wishy-washy Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the media last year, which really failed to deliver, a private member’s bill suggesting a new code of conduct for the media industry may be introduced.

I don’t really like legislation. Being in education, I tend to believe in the power of knowledge to produce change. It may be slow, but it works. It’s also life-long. The earlier it’s instilled and in an age-appropriate way, the better. But it just shows how helpless many adults feel against this onslaught in media and popular culture and are keen to protect their kids and want to enlist official help.

Sometime media commentator, Jane Caro, has criticised the proposed bill. In her comments she does what a few of those trying to silence rather than address concerns do – that is reflect on her own childhood experiences as an example. Now, I don’t know about Jane, but I do think that comparing a childhood of 40 odd years ago to those kids experience today is a bit like comparing a scooter to a spaceship.
She says: “Trying to hold girls back from the natural desire to put on mum’s lipstick, read big sister’s magazines, play with Barbie – who after all looks like a grown woman – I can’t see how that’s going to have any more detrimental effect than [it did] on me and my generation back in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Firstly, no-one that I know is trying to hold their kids back from doing these wonderful things. Secondly, Jane hasn’t read the research, has she? The research that shows a rise in depression, sexually transmitted diseases, body dysmorphia and self-esteem issues in young women and men. Issues that are starting at a younger and younger age (eg. girls as young as six presenting at hospitals with bulimia or expressing a wish to be prettier, thinner etc.) because of the rampant exposure to sexual (not sex itself) ideas and imagery. I think she needs to talk to Dr Michael Carr-Gregg or Dr Joe Tucci. Where she is right is in noting that kids do possess a natural desire to grow-up fast, to experiment with mum’s (or dad’s) clothes and make-up etc. Expressing yourself sexually is natural and normal and wonderful, even in very young children. What’s not right is to have it presented in a package that can be bought and exchanged and performed in public. And this is where the difference between Jane’s childhood and those experienced by kids today, lies.

Once upon a time, practicing being an adult was confined to the bedroom, house or family. Dress-ups, where kids paraded and played in mum and dad’s clothes, were an accepted and endorsed part of growing up. Nowadays, these dress-ups occur in public and very young kids are encouraged to try on a variety of adult identities for size.

Much of this is enshrined in cultural practice where kids are able to enter beauty pageants, idol competitions, and mimic their favourite celebrities at home, but also at school, the street and shopping malls, grabbing crotches, chests and buttocks and moaning, ‘don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?’ Kids are being catapulted into a world of innuendo and titillation long before they’re ready.

We don’t need reminders of petite JonBenet Ramsay, she of the ‘bedroom eyes’, to know there’s something deeply wrong about this exploitation of kids’ natural urge to want to accelerate their childhood. Hence the hue and cry about Julia Lira.

Bombarded with approximately 400,000 images a year, kids cannot escape nor easily unravel the implicit sexuality in advertising, films, TV, music, websites and magazines, that suggest that it’s not necessarily how you look (though that helps), it’s how you flaunt those looks that counts for currency in today’s world.

Barbie, and her nemesis, Bratz, aren’t just in the toy box anymore; their human counterparts are in the school yard, the TV, on the cover of magazines, lunchboxes, panties and singing songs. But while kids might demand the sexy ‘stuff’, ‘look’ and food, and savour the (temporary) results, earning kudos in the playground, it’s adults who have not only created this, but bought it as well: hook, line and sinker.

While adults are also susceptible to seductive messages, it’s their responsibility to become the filters as opposed to the facilitators. Just because the corporations tell us that in order to get ahead in this Microsoft eat Apple world, our kids need to conform to a particular version of childhood to fit in, doesn’t mean we have to literally buy it.

As Julie Gale suggests and Sweden and Quebec (who ban advertising to kids under 12 and 13 respectively) have demonstrated: we can refuse to buy the products and subsequently, the ideas embedded within them, allowing kids to be just that: kids.

Adults must protect very young kids from the notion that sex sells – products and the self. If they do, they’ll be given the time and space to create solid foundations and nurture kids’ imaginations and identities; ones that aren’t contingent upon sex, looks, wining a competition, getting their face on TV, or material possessions.

Believe me I am no wowser – just another voice of concern.

Today I did something I haven’t done in a long, long time – I bought the Women’s Weekly – the issue with the gorgeous Lisa Wilkinson on the front and the one with the infamous Tony Abbott interview. I wanted to give myself a context for understanding all the brouhaha that erupted last week when our budgy-smuggler-wearing Opposition Leader was quoted as having said ‘women should treat virginity as a gift.’ My knee-jerk response was, ‘You’re a gift, Abbott, with a silent ‘f’.

The interview, which also includes one with his wife, 52 year old Margaret who, readers are informed, runs a Childcare Centre on Sydney’s North Shore, is initially fairly benign and tells Abbott’s story, which is pretty well public property (his religious background, time at university where he thought he fathered a son, the public breaking of that tale, his time in a seminary etc.) in a sympathetic light. Only in the second half does it start to deal with issues in which readers of a women’s magazine might also be interested. Only, in this instance, the questions and Abbott’s answers, attracted a much broader audience.

Abbott, we know, has a very firm Catholic faith. He also has strong views on morality that are largely defined by his personal beliefs and Catholic teachings. There are very few people who would object to anyone having a personal moral compass and trying to raise their family according to that. What many people did and still do object to, however, is the fact that Abbott, as a politician who’s elected and paid to govern the country (or, in this instance, keep the elected Federal party in line), sees fit to offer his personal views as some kind of arbitrary ethical yardstick by which all women, families, relationships and even ideologies should be measured. The most infamous now being that ‘virginity’ is a gift ‘that women should not give away lightly.’ The inference being that many of us do – but surely, how, when and to whom a women ‘loses her virginity, is her prerogative? If we want to ‘throw it away’, that’s our decision, isn’t it? (Please note, I am talking about ‘women’ here – young women and those who, age appropriately, are capable of understanding and freely choosing a sexual relationship).

And why do we say ‘lose’? When a child first speaks, do we say, they ‘lost’ their silence? When a boy first ejaculates, does he ‘lose’ his semen? Interesting that virginity, the act of the hymen breaking and a first sexual experience for a woman, is somehow framed in a negative light.

At one point the interviewer expresses surprise that Abbott continues to answer questions that ‘almost every other politician in the country would have tried to avoid’ – namely, around sex before marriage, contraception, abortion and gay marriages. But Abbott ploughs right on ahead. Perhaps he explains the reason for this peculiar need to conflate personal beliefs and political leadership when he admits he’s always had a ‘a slight tendency to want to draw attention to myself.’

Seriously, Abbott is entitled to his views, he’s entitled to raise his family as he wants and instill in them his faith (which to a degree has failed as he can no longer ‘bribe’ the girls to attend church – but Margaret holds herself responsible for that), but what he’s not entitled to do is discuss ‘women’s issues’ (which in many instances are also men’s issues – we live together in this society), as if they are homogenous, framed by a Catholic or Christian principle, and is if he, with his very narrow and privileged world-view and experiences, holds the answers.

Analysing the interview through the lens of Abbott’s approach to women sheds some rather problematic light on some of his answers.

Let me demonstrate. Firstly, he apologises to the interviewer by saying ‘I have to call my princess’ – this is his term of endearment for his wife. He later refers to one of his three beautiful daughters (they are physically stunning), ‘as my darling angel.’ The use of the possessive is not lost on me, nor are the hyperbolic, if affectionate terms for his partner and daughter. But they are also terms which objectify and place these women on an unstable and very high platform. How easy must it be for a princess to stumble, to behave inappropriately and ‘lose’ that sheen he bestows, or for an ‘angel’ to fall and ‘lose’ (that word again) her halo? Just a thought. I know I wouldn’t want be described in either of those terms – too much to live up to and it also suggests that I don’t live in the real world, but a privileged and somewhat parallel reality. Or at least, Abbott places his women there.

This is taken even further when the interviewer points out to Abbott that many women have a ‘problem’ with him (I don’t know him, so my problem is not with him, per se, but it’s certainly with his personal and public politics – the personal which he continuously makes public). Instead of acknowledging this is probably true, he does what many politicians have a tendency to do when backed into the Truth Corner, they fudge the answer and/or fall back on shaky statistics to support their position. ‘I suspect,’ he states, ‘that it is probably more than 10 per cent, but less than 70 percent’ [of women who resent him]. Probably. That’s a word that crops up again and again – it’s non-committal – it’s an all-too-easy escape clause.

But look at his stats. Why is it so difficult for him, a politician for goodness sakes, to accept that many women (and men) don’t like the fact that he’s so prepared to advise them on their morality, sexuality, bodies and relationships. That he appears to believe that he is morally superior – as if he’s graduated from Catholic seminary. He treats the world as his pulpit and sermonises constantly. And we loathe it. That he wraps it in a quite specific religious rhetoric alienates us even more, as if those who don’t follow the Rule For ‘Clean Living’ as espoused by Tony the Abbott, are morally inferior or already on their way to hell. The road to hell, as Abbott sees it, must be littered with all sorts of ‘fallen’ women – and let’s remember, when you place anything on a pedestal, not only is it easy to fall, but it becomes very damaged once it hits the ground.

But, instead of acknowledging this tendency to disenchant females and/or venerate them as ‘angels’ and ‘princesses’, he further justifies his self-righteousness by giving us a very clear picture of the type of women who do not like his ideologies. He is quoted as saying: ‘…I suspect that [what] we are talking about here is a woman of a certain age, in a certain line of work.’
Wait.. it gets better… he takes it further…

‘I think we are talking about younger professional women, essentially, who, for perfectly good reasons, don’t want to be told by anyone else how they should live their lives.’

Deep breath. According to Tony’s logic, older women, non-professional women (what’s a ‘non-professional women’ anyhow?) and those in certain ‘lines-of work’ (what does he mean there?), might like what he has to say. I imagine they are either ‘angels’ or ‘princesses’ as well. For the record, please note that at least Abbott does admit he has a tendency to instruct women – he states that women ‘don’t want to be told by anyone else how they should live their lives.’

No. We don’t. That’s because, young, old, professional, non-professional, angels or princess, we can actually decide that for ourselves.

You know, in making our politicians household names, that is, beyond their elected roles and beyond the hustings, through interviews, the talk-show circuit, guest appearances on prime time shows, we’ve allowed this bleed of privately held beliefs into the public domain to occur. It’s encouraged as we seek to turn elected leaders into ‘celebrities’ or ‘personalities’. Now, even someone as intelligent as Abbott appears to be, doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. No, worse, he does, but we’ve given him a platform from which to be heard, validated him through the media, and now he believes it’s his God-given right to preach to the non-converted.

Interestingly, for a man that’s surrounded by women – wife and three daughters, closest friend, the private things he keeps preaching about are those which effect women – our minds, our bodies, our potential to have successful professional and personal lives – ‘straight’ or ‘gay’, religious or non-religious and regardless, it seems of cultural or socio-economic background and education. For all that he loves his ‘princess’ and his ‘angels’, has a reputation for flirting, and is represented as supportive of women beyond his family – except in actions and words – I can’t help but feel that Tony has a big problem with the opposite sex. That problem centres on his lack of ability to control them and his responses to them. That at one stage he chose to live a religious life cloistered with men is very telling.

Last year, Tony’s daughter, Frances, called him a ‘lame, gay, churchy loser’ – something which he repeated at a public forum. Why? Because it gave him kudos to admit to ‘failing’ in his child’s eyes. It, like everything else that Tony Abbott says, is timed to evoke a deliberate response.

Choosing a woman’s magazine to articulate and ‘explain’ his views on women’s and other controversial social issues was another of these strategies. Even the fallout has been, if not contrived, at least micro-managed in order to give him further opportunity to explain and appeal to conservative (ultra-conservative) views. Working under the premise that any publicity is good publicity, I think that Tony Abbott still fails to understand that when it comes to women, we’re more inclined than ever to think like his daughter.

In this latest interview, Abbott has exposed more then he intended. He’s an anachronism that has no place in Twenty-First Century politics and certainly has no right to preach what he tries (and fails) to practice. Tony, you’re not an Abbott.