Hypersexualizing our Girls
If you’re searching for an example of just how hypersexualized our culture has become, then look no further than the rebranding of Miley Cyrus. It seems like just yesterday she was a squeaky-clean Disney icon who was loved by millions of girls around the globe. Well, she is still loved, but she has undergone the requisite hypersexed media makeover and now looks like most other young female celebrities who are competing for stardom in a pornified culture. From her photo shoot in Vanity Fair, where she wore bed head hair and not much else, to her pole dancing at the Teen Choice Awards, Cyrus has been forced by the dictates of the market to conform to an increasingly narrow image of what it means to be a female in today’s culture.
If you think I’m exaggerating, then flip through a magazine at the supermarket checkout, channel surf, take a drive to look at billboards, or watch TV ads, and you will be bombarded with images that a decade ago would have been considered soft-core porn.
People not immersed in pop culture tend to assume that what we see today is just more of the same stuff that previous generations grew up on. But what is different today is not only the hypersexualization of the image, but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female. Today’s tidal wave of soft-core porn has normalized the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim, and downright boring. Today a girl or young woman looking for an alternative to the Britney–Paris–Miley look will quickly come to the grim realization that the only alternative to looking hot is to be invisible.
As I argue in my new book “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality”, the effect on girls and young women is profound. What girl wants to be invisible? As she develops her sexual and gender identity, she is being fed a steady diet of plasticized, formulaic, and generic images that tell her that to be female is to look and act hypersexual. These are powerful images that shape identities and aspirations: they tell girls how to behave and how to achieve status. Even more important, they affect boys’ attitudes and behavior towards girls. Absent a range of alternative images, what real choice does a girl have today?
Rather than celebrating the hypersexualized culture as a manifestation of female empowerment, we should see the porn culture as a bully that manipulates, coerces, and grooms girls into conformity by providing them with limited choices. This culture is slowly chipping away at girls’ self-esteem, stripping them of a sense of themselves as whole human beings, and providing them with an identity that glorifies sex and trivializes every other human attribute.
An American Psychological Association study on the sexualization of girls found that there was ample evidence to conclude that sexualizing girls “has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs.” Some of these effects include risky sexual behavior; higher rates of eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem; and reduced academic performance.
There are of course girls who successfully resist this culture, but they pay a price by having to embrace an identity that is at odds with mainstream culture. What I find from my interviews is that these young women and girls tend have someone in their life—a mother, an older woman mentor, or a coach—who provides some form of immunization to the cultural messages. But often this immunization is short-lived.
Every summer I co-teach an institute in media literacy at Wheelock College, and many of the participants are parents or teachers. Year after year we hear the same story: they are working hard to provide their daughters or students with ways to resist the culture, and for the early years the girls seem to be internalizing the counter-ideology. However, at some point—usually around puberty but increasingly earlier—the girls begin to adopt more conventional feminine behavior as their peer group becomes the most salient socializing force.
Instead of capitulating to the hypersexualized image, we need to provide girls with media literacy skills that will empower them to critically analyze the images, ideas, and messages that our culture throws at them. They also need a peer group that will support them in their resistance, since nobody can do this alone. And in the long run we need to build a robust feminist movement that will fight the increasing hypersexualization of our culture, because girls have a right to an authentic sexuality that belongs to them, not the porn culture.
Gail Dines is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her new book is “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.” Her website is gaildines.com
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