A new book ' The Lolita Effect' explores myths in the media about girls' sexuality, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
TWO SEVEN-YEAR-OLD boys in the back of the car were discussing a girl in their class. “She’s hot,” said one. “Yeah, she’s really hot,” agreed the other enthusiastically.
There was a bemused silence. Neither had a clue what “hot” really meant – except that it was a word that went with girls.
"The goal of hotness is pervasive in girl culture," points out M Gigi Durham, the author of a new book, The Lolita Effect. Girls are brainwashed by much of the media into thinking that it is more important to be "hot" than it is to be smart. And to be hot is to be sexy.
That is not to recognise that in Ireland girls have been consistently outperforming boys in the Junior Cert and the Leaving Cert in recent years. But the pressure to conform to a stereotypical view of attractiveness as well eats away at the self-esteem of many highly intelligent girls.
The unrelenting media message is that “sexy” is only achieved by girls who are pretty, thin, preferably blonde, wear revealing clothes and know what boys want. The constant promotion of youthfulness and being part of the “in” crowd belies the fact that sex is a gift to be enjoyed equally by all people, comments Durham.
Parents, and other significant adults such as teachers, do little to counteract this skewed message because they find it so difficult to discuss sexuality with children. "Research shows that they are getting their sexual education more from the media than any other source, and that's troubling. It does indicate there is a vacuum," Durham tells The Irish Timeson the phone from her home in Iowa City.
A professor of journalism and mass communication, Durham started studying the media’s sexualisation of girls about 15 years ago. “Then I had girls and it became more relevant,” says the mother of two. Although “the Lolita effect” obviously has an impact on boys too, and how they view girls, she makes no apologies for concentrating on its effect on her own gender.
“Girls bear the brunt of all this. Ninety per cent of eating disorders are experienced by girls; more girls are sexually abused than boys. Girls take the hit – that is why I am focusing on girls.”
However, she says she was pleasantly surprised at the amount of interest shown in the book by fathers as well as mothers, when it was first published on the other side of the Atlantic last year. People tend to think that feminism is anti-male but it is not at all, she stresses.
Durham also makes it clear that she is no prude and her starting point for the book is that children are sexual beings. Whether we parents like to face up to it or not, they have already started the journey of discovering their own sexuality, for which they need factual and age-appropriate information.
The trouble is, girls are growing up with a narrowly defined, corporate and sexually objectified version of femininity. The sight of groups of teenage girls, changing from their Ugg boots to spindly stilettos for an evening out, reflects the media images with which they are bombarded. They totter along to the discos, all dressed in the uniform of our celebrity era – short skirts and skimpy tops, with fake tan and dyed-blonde hair, looking like clones of each other.
The myths the media promotes about girls' sexuality are dissected with thought-provoking analysis in The Lolita Effect. The US, the home of child beauty pageants and the Barbie and Bratz dolls, is a rich source of examples from its popular culture that is peddled all over the world.
Durham not only shows how the media, with vested commercial interests, grooms girls for consumerism and
sex, but she also suggests ways to help teach youngsters to see these images and ploys for what they are.
Turning off the television, banning unsupervised use of the internet and keeping teen magazines out of the house is not going to protect children from the influences all around them. It is far better that they learn to be media savvy.
“You can’t keep them in a bubble,” says Durham. “I do think parents should monitor what their kids are watching and the type of [computer] games they’re playing. But they are going to run into this somewhere, at other people’s houses, or in the mall, so the best thing to do is to help them think more critically about it, more analytically about the representations.”
While she has written 230 pages about the “Lolita effect”, how would she sum it up in one sentence? It is “about the mediated myths of girls’ sexuality that circulate in our culture, in opposition to healthy, accurate, progressive sexual representations that are in girls’ best interest”.
Here in Ireland, as a society only recently emerged from the dark decades of very unhealthy repression of sex under the rule of the Catholic church, it is no wonder that parents, taught by nuns and priests, struggle to talk about sexuality with a generation among whom “sexting” (sending a sexually explicit message or picture by mobile phone) is a chat-up line.
“We seem to shuttle between the two extremes – from Puritanism, which is a really repressive attitude towards sex, that it is taboo and we shouldn’t talk about it, to the other extreme, which is that anything goes,” adds Durham.
“What we need to do is to find a sensible middle ground where we can deal with it in accurate, thoughtful ways that are good for society as a whole.”
To give today’s teenage girls in Ireland their due, no doubt some are already standing on that middle ground, despite the best efforts of some sections of the media.
And I suspect that some adults who initiate discussions along the lines Durham suggests, may find that these days education about sexuality and relationships is a two-way street.
- The Lolita Effectby M Gigi Durham is published by Duckworth Overlook, £8.99.
