Toddlers & Tiaras: The Quintessential Reason for SPARK
The idea of dressing young girls up way past their age with heavy amounts of makeup and, in some cases, clothing that exposes their bodies, is astoundingly unacceptable. I don’t and never will understand the need to parade young girls around in makeup and extravagant outfits to give them the message that their beauty is all that matters. Not what kind of person they are, or will be, or their interests, but solely their meaning is all based on looks.
This is not about these women wanting things; it’s about men wanting to see them do things, and that takes something that really should be empowering — the idea that women can own their sexuality — and transforms it into yet another male fantasy. It takes away the actual power of the women and turns their “sexual liberation” into just another way for dudes to get off. And that is at least ten times as gross as regular cheesecake, minimum.
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| — | Laura Hudson, The Big Problem with Superheroines and Their “Liberated Sexuality” | Comics Alliance (via sparksummit) |
via Radio Colorado College, this interview with Professor Tomi-Ann Roberts explores the issue of the sexualization of girls and women in our society. (This full version runs 20 minutes, for a shorter version click here.)
“Girls are not passive recipients of these cultural messages. Girls are active agents. We know from developmental cognitive psychology that young boys and girls, once they know what their gender is, are very motivated to be the best example of their gender. And if the examples of femininity around you are a sort of tarted up, pornographied sexuality, then that’s what you’re psyched to be.
In the 1960s they found that 11 percent of men and 44 percent of women on the covers of Rolling Stone were sexualized. In the 2000s, 17 percent of men were sexualized (an increase of 55 percent from the 1960s), and 83 percent of women were sexualized (an increase of 89 percent). Among those images that were sexualized, 2 percent of men and 61 percent of women were hypersexualized. “In the 2000s,” Hatton says, “there were 10 times more hypersexualized images of women than men, and 11 times more non-sexualized images of men than of women.
