I have just stumbled across the Mumsnet campaign against the sexualisation of children, Let Girls Be Girls. I do support this campaign but I must take issue with the apparent focus on girls. Having read through the forum thread for this campaign, the members of Mumsnet don’t seem to appreciate that premature sexualisation is just as much a problem for boys as it is for girls, the consequences are different.
It’s true that it is girl’s clothes that is designed to give them the sexual appeal of grown women – and let’s be honest here, it works. The pictures of scantily clad or naked women in magazines and newspapers don’t help to give girls a healthy images of themselves. But, they don’t give boys a healthy images of girls – or women – either. Teenage boys are captivated by the sexy images in both men’s and women’s magazines, not to mention lingerie catalogues, deodorant adverts and even places where sex has no business (anyone remember Claudia Schiffer [sic] stripping off before getting into a car). It is quite easy for this to lead onto pornography and then into an porn and sex addiction and very questionable behaviour.
When you read news stories of young boys raping their female teacher or classmates, how do you think this happened? Because we as a society have not just become permissive about sex but sexualise everything and thus give it an even stronger appeal. On the one hand, we don’t need pornography because society is pornographic; on the other hand, mainstream sexual images become unarousing after a while and more extreme images are needed.
Not only should we let girls be girls, we should let boys be boys.
