‘We’re living in a toxic soup of images,’ says Maggie Hamilton, author of ‘What’s Happening To Our Girls?’ (Viking). ‘When we see all this porn and nudity we judge it from a lifetime of experience, but young girls have no such framework, so they assume, for instance, that you do have oral and anal sex at 12.’
Once firmly cocooned in childhood, 12 is now at the upper end of what marketers have coined the ‘tweenage’ years. Redefining an age bracket is nothing new. In the 1950s, American marketers invented the term ‘teen’, in order to sell jeans and rock ’n’ roll. But while teenager is an inclusive term, the tween is a distinctly female, commercial label for children aged seven to 13.
The rise of the tweenager has coincided with rapid social change. Rampant consumerism – we spend £100 billion a year on our children – and a boom in digital technology mean kids today are brand conscious and sex savvy. Pornography is ubiquitous and unavoidable and our morality is becoming increasingly relaxed.
But this complacency is creating a generation of girls who think that looking ‘hot’ is their life’s work. A 2009 study found that 46 per cent of 11- to 16-year-old girls would consider cosmetic surgery, while one in five 11-year-olds is trying to lose weight. Hamilton believes a whole generation of kids are now having more narrow life experiences. ‘To develop the brain, kids need to be out there in the world – playing with pots and pans, eating worms, running through the park – but now they’re sitting in their bedrooms, surrounded by branded toys.’
A world of makeovers
Bratz dolls are a popular tween accessory. Marketed in bikinis, sitting in hot tubs, mixing drinks, today’s girls aspire to live this pneumatic lifestyle. Even traditional toys are being sexed up. Today’s Disney characters – the Little Mermaid and Jasmine – have more cleavage, fewer clothes and are depicted as sexier than previous heroines such as Snow White and Cinderella.
According to Dr Sharon Lamb, psychology professor and co-author of ‘Packaging Girlhood’ (St Martin’s Griffin), girls today are rewarded for appearing sexy. ‘It plays into their self-worth, because that’s what gets them attention in society,’ she says. More than 25,000 users of the social networking site Bebo have ‘slut’ as their username, and girls know that provocative pictures lead to friend requests. For very young girls it’s even trickier to determine what’s appropriate. Dr Joe Tucci of the Australian Childhood Foundation has expressed concern that teachers were seeing six, seven and eight-year-olds involved in ‘coercive, manipulative sexual behaviours’, due to what he saw as ‘a confusion around what sexuality means’.
Adults who look after these girls are losing their grip. ‘The teachers I spoke with were questioning whether they can continue to do their job because a lot of what they’re dealing with is so overwhelming,’ says Hamilton. Faced with the knowledge that girls under 16 are having threesomes and ‘rainbow parties’ (where the aim of the night is to get the most girls to ‘go down’ on you), it’s hardly surprising that teachers are tired of dealing with the emotional fall-out.
But why are girls willing to take part in such degrading activities? According to Hamilton, it’s due to unprecedented levels of anxiety and a lack of confidence. ‘Tweens are leading battery hen existences and they look to celebrity culture for their information.’
We’ve come to accept that picking apart a celebrity’s appearance is part of the gossip-magazines’ game, but the vitriol is now seeping into the news in general. ‘The tabloids hold women politicians up to scrutiny, and focus particularly on their looks,’ says Natasha Walter, author of ‘Living Dolls’ ( Virago). ‘It makes young girls think women who go into politics aren’t very feminine and I think it affects their ambitions.’
The beginnings of change
Walter believes parents have had their heads in the sand. ‘I’d rather pretend that I live in a nice little bubble, but I think we’re starting to realise that all this isn’t OK,’ she says. But change is afoot. The Times recently introduced a regular ‘Babe Watch’ column, where readers expose casual sexism.
Then there are the grass roots organisations: Object, which covers lads’ mags with slogans such as ‘This insults all women’, and a group of mothers have started a campaign against the ‘pinkification’ of girls’ lives. ‘What we have to realise is that these young girls are reflecting back to us our values,’ says Hamilton. ‘And that is a very hard pill to swallow.’
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