Signs of the Times

Normalizing Sex

In the latest edition of Salvo Magazine (which you can subscribe to by clicking here), I pointed out that one of the subversive features of the over-sexualized environment our children are growing up in is that they are becoming desensitized. In a society where sex is used to sell everything from shoes to vegetables, the danger is that children become so used to it that they cease to consider things to be sexual which clearly are.
 
This struck me when the BBC did a documentary on the sexualization of children and Sophie Raworth visited 13-year old Chloe. Dressed skimpily and imitating the erotic dancers she had seen on television, Chloe’s dream is to go all over world as a dancer. Raworth asked Chloe if she was trying to be sexual. Chloe confessed that there was nothing sexual in her mind when she was dancing. Moreover, she said, as long as she kept her clothes on, there was nothing inappropriate about her moves.
 
Certainly the self-evaluation of a 13-year old girl should be taken with a heavy pinch of salt. Yet as I point out in my Salvo article 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains', I think there is an important lesson to be learned from the fact that Chloe failed to acknowledge the obvious eroticism of her behaviour. As our children are bombarded with more and more sexual stimuli, one effect is that they cease to even see certain things as sexual, with the consequence that important barriers are lowered.

Chloe found this out in a rather disturbing way when she was eleven. A stranger who had seen some of the dance moves Chloe posted online contacted her to tell her how sexy she was. Chloe panicked and immediately removed all the videos.
 
Yet the question remains: how have young people like Chloe managed to convince themselves that all but the most explicit displays (in Chloe’s case, taking off her clothes) are non-sexual and benign? And do the products and media that girls like her are able to so easily access have anything to do with this?

The answer to this question may lay in the thought of one of the early pioneers of the sex education movement. In his book The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) described the means for achieving a society that would not put any obstacles in the path of sexual gratification. I have discussed Reich in my Salvo article, in which I point out that

For all his moral anarchism, Reich was perceptive. He realized that in order to achieve the type of sexual utopia he desired, he must first move society away from the shyness and embarrassment surrounding sex. In particular, he argued, people must lose their reluctance to expose erotically important parts of their bodies. Reich attempted to facilitate this by having psychotherapy sessions in which he would require his clients to remove all their clothes.

Reich would be pleased if he could see a European summer today, which is more in keeping with his ideal than what we find in brothels. In a brothel, women have overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to advertise sex; on a sunny beach, scores of women can be seen who have overcome this natural shyness with no thought of sex at all. Indeed, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge the erotic implications of minimalistic attire, we are fast approaching Reich’s goal of a society in which shyness has been overcome and sex is flattened of its inherent potency. “Profane” best describes Reich’s ideal and its realization in the contemporary situation, given that the term originally meant “to treat as common.”

The current debate about the sexualization of children needs to be charted within this same rubric. Certainly when low-cut blouses are marketed for 13-year olds, when music videos for children are saturated with sexual imagery and when sex is constantly used to sell products to young teens, the result is going to be that many girls will become hyper-sexualized. However, such saturation can equally have a desensitizing effect since it unconsciously orients youth to treat their sexuality as something trivial, benign and commonplace. Either way, it primes girls for perverts like Reich: the former because hyper-sexualized girls will want to have sex; the latter because girls are less likely to guard and protect that which they have been oriented to treat as being merely common.

To read more about this, subscribe to Salvo magazine and turn to my article, 'Sex & the Kiddies: The Sexualization of Children & How Advertising & Entertainment Change Their Brains.'

Sexualizing Britain’s Youth

Earlier this month, BBC Panorama ran a program titled “Too much too young.” The program explored whether Britain’s children are being encouraged to become prematurely sexualized.

 

Although the program tended to downplay the seriousness of the issue, there has been a string of reports in the newspapers recently highlighting the urgency of the matter. Music videos, displays in High Street shops, lap-dancing kits, padded bras for primary school girls, playboy-branded pencil cases and features in teen magazines are merely some of the tools which are helping to sexualize Britain’s youth at alarmingly young ages.

 

There have even been reports in the newspapers about a pajama set aimed at ten year olds with “Porn Star” written on it.

 

But it is not just parents who have been concerned. Government has weighed in with five initiatives in three years in an attempt to respond to the issue. Their latest plan, according to a BBC news report, is “to explore whether rules should prevent the marketing of items such as ‘Porn star’ T-shirts or padded bras…. A code of conduct on ‘age appropriate’ marketing and a new watchdog are among plans being considered by the review.”

 

Prime Minister David Cameron, himself a father of three, has made this issue a personal concern after discovering beds marketed towards six-year-olds with a “Lolita” branding (Lolita is a novel about a paedophile).

 

So far the debate over the sexualisation of children has centred primarily on quantitative questions. Are our young people being exposed to too much sex? Does this exposure happen at too young of an age?

 

Now certainly questions like these are important, especially when we ask who profits from the sexualisation of a 13 or 14 year-olds. I think few would doubt that the beneficiaries include the growing network of pedophiles in Britain.

 

What I find interesting, however, is that by framing the debate solely in terms of the above questions, the discussion has excluded crucial qualitative distinctions we need to be making. In an article I recently wrote for the Telegraph website, I have used the Panorama program as a springboard to explore what some of these qualitative distinctions are. I suggest that instead of being worried about our youth being sexualized too early, we should give attention to the way they are being sexualized, and in particular the way that they are being subtly influence to adopt a particular narrative about sex.

 

Click here to read more.

Neutralizing our Sexuality

The strangeness inherent in such things as co-ed dorms, co-ed bathrooms, co-ed wrestling and even co-ed sleeping bags, is not that such things exist, but that they can exist without sexual connotations. This can only be achieved to the extent that gender has been emptied of its implicit sexuality. In a world where manhood and womanhood have been deconstructed, it should hardly come as a surprise. Whether a woman strips down to a bikini on the grounds that there is nothing sexual about it, or puts on a long dress designed to remove all shape, in both cases her latent sexuality is not being properly acknowledged. In both cases, the subject is unconsciously acting out the unisex presuppositions of our post-Enlightenment culture. In a brothel, women have overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to advertizes sex; on a sunny beach, scores of women can be seen who have overcome this natural shyness with no thought of sex at all. Indeed, by refusing to explicitly acknowledge the erotic implications of minimalistic attire, we are approaching sexual revolutionist William Reich’s ideal of a sexual utopia in which all shyness has been overcome and sexuality itself has been trivialized and flattened of its innate potency. By deconstructing our world (materialism), the Enlightenment couldn’t help but deconstruct gender (androgyny), with the result that our sexuality has been neutralized, stripped of any transcendent categories that might otherwise elevate it above that which is merely common.

The above quotation is part of a larger argument developed here

Wolf in Bunny's Clothing

The Playboy Factor
by James M. Kushiner

(Or how America Got Porn Again). The New Republic posts a positive review (The Bunny Revolution) of playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo (Oxford University Press). I am supposed to applaud this magazine for being "at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations." The List:

The collapse of the U.S. Postal System’s de facto censorship apparatus? playboy had a hand in that. Changing attitudes about sex outside of marriage? playboy was part of this, too. The specious notion that a high-earning, free-spending bachelor is some kind of epicurean rebel? playboy yet again. The feminist movement? playboy “was partly responsible” for it, as Gloria Steinem once admitted. The now common glossy-magazine practice of advertising luxuries that readers cannot possibly afford? Thank you, Playboy. The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

If I think, rather shallowly it seems, that playboy helped push women as sex objects, I am instructed:

It was Hefner’s great insight that girly pictures divorced from any kind of human individuality could not be anything except dirty. And so his Playmates had names, jobs, personalities, and fact sheets, however illusory these often were. In some crucial way, then, playboy gave what was previously considered pornography a kind of dignity. It was a deeply limiting, dingbat dignity, to be sure, but to allow the mid-century American woman any identity beyond that of mother, virgin, or whore increased her available social options by 25 percent. Women would naturally revolt against this, and no one could blame them, but the fact remains that playboy helped liberate female sexuality from a Bastille of iniquitous morality, in the long run surely doing more to help women than harm them.

I find this insulting to the women I know and love who were alive in the iniquitous mid-century.

Hefner described himself at the beginning of playboy as Al Kinsey's "pamphleteer." He bunnied up Kinsey's hallucination of a free-sex world that would sever sexual restraints and eliminate deviance by redefintion. Yes, Hefner was indeed Kinsey's pamphleteer. Give him that--he wants it, he owns it. And Kinsey? A first-class, world-class pseudo-scientist pervert, child-abuser, who helped pave the way for the acceptance of pedophilia. Dressed up in a bunny suit.

Originally posted at Mere Comments.