Girls, sexuality, and popular culture

Talk radio makes me want to vomit. But due to some dreadful, masochistic urge, I can't help but turn it on once in a while just to see what sort of evil tripe is being fed to its audience. "Shock jocks" seem to be proliferating at an alarming rate, like a colony of rats left undisturbed in a dark basement, and one of the favorite targets for these men seems to be adolescent girls.

In the few minutes each day that I subject myself to this torture, I have heard "shock jocks" speculate about how "hot" young adolescent stars Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen will be once they've developed breasts. I've heard them discuss how Britney Spears should be worshipped because she sports a Catholic schoolgirl outfit and is also, conveniently, of legal age. One segment, on why a 17-- year-old girl is responsible for seducing her 35-year-old teacher, prompted me to seek out a Web site dedicated to Seattle-based talk show host B.J. Shea. Big mistake. The Webmaster here even goes so far as to provide a link to Washington State's Age of Consent Laws with the heading, "This page is strictly for those who intend to have sexual relations with minors or those who want real content in their Web sites."

It is sickening to think that this culture exists, but in some ways, it is even more disturbing that feminists who talk about revisioning sexual education curriculum for girls do not also talk about the consequences of empowering girls in a popular culture that holds these attitudes. This is hardly equality, and the sad fact is that teaching girls to be sexually aware, sexually confident, and in control without also somehow warning them about these noxious elements of popular culture is essentially putting them at risk for further damage.

In the present-day U.S. there is little differentiation between the developing sexuality of girls and the fully formed sexuality of adult women. Because of age and power disparities, girls are never in control when involved sexually with adults. Thus, girls packaged to sell products or ideas to an adult marketplace are not making an active choice to be sexual. Their very nature as sexual beings is being exploited. And this isn't just happening on talk radio: anyone with a computer or television or magazine can find girls arrayed for heterosexual consumption.

For example, while doing Internet research on empowering girls and revisionist sexual education curricula for my Master's thesis, I had more luck finding porn than theory. In just one "let's see what happens" Web search on Google.com, the term "Lolita Porn" yielded upwards of 282,000 hits. A recently disbanded Internet site that featured child pornography, Landslide Productions, reportedly had over 250,000 subscribers and as much as $1.4 million in profits in a month (Marquis par. 4). (Interestingly, the word "teen" seems more likely to collect hits than "girl": perhaps girl is someone's daughter, whereas teen is the anonymous female body found in advertisements, waiting for a man to seduce her.)

In popular music, we find teenage girls continually marketed as highly sexualized beings, ready to cater to the whims of men. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Destiny's Child, and countless other teen stars parade across MTV and VH1. They are just adult enough to be available, just young enough to be non-threatening. Lyrically, when referring to relationships, the word "girl" is consistently paired with "man," a glowing indicator of both the infantilization of adult women and the sexualization of girls.

In the film industry, the theme of the adult male who becomes infatuated with or is otherwise transformed by an adolescent female flourishes. Often, the male protagonist's attraction to an adolescent female signifies his discontent, while the girls are innocent and naive and believe that he will eventually tumble into love. This theme appears in Ted Demme's Beautiful Girls, Sam Mendes's American Beauty, and Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty-all directed by men. The depraved teenage seductress still rears her cleavage, ready to lure men astray in films like Alan Shapiro's The Crush and Katt Shea's Poison Ivy. Films that feature adolescent girls in control of their sexuality, such as Tamara Jenkins's Slums of Beverly Hills or Sarah Jacobson's Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore, are rare and are generally released only to limited audiences. In the case of Colette Burson's Coming Soon, a full-length feature about three girls in search of an orgasm, they are never released at all.

In this culture of heterosexual, patriarchal privilege, men are entitled to the bodies of girls. And why shouldn't they be? Men have seen girls' bodies in numerous sexy and emotionless displays, in everything from movies to television to advertising. There is also little distinction between real and fantasy girls. This popular culture will not acknowledge the emotional and physical consequences of its abuse because it does not see girls as human beings; instead, they are as inanimate as mountains and exist only to be conquered.