The Emergence of 'Sexualization' as a Social Problem more

1 The Emergence of Sexualization as a Social Problem Abstract The article explores the history of the way the idea of ‘sexualization’ has been problematized – situated as an object of concern – in the USA and UK. My focus here will be on media discourses, having analysed policy and sociological discourses on sexualization elsewhere. I document that, from the early 1980s in the USA, the term ‘sexualization’ came to describe a mal-socialisation which causes the precocious entry by the child into adult forms of sexual subjectivity and desire. I will argue that the media problematization of sexualization has been the result of a ‘discursive coalition’ between a number of conservative and feminist commentators, who for quite different reasons wished to justify measures to protect and regulate the sexuality and morality of young women. Underpinning this coalition is an inadequate account of sexual and commercial choice, as either simply present or absent for young women. The emergence of sexualization as a social problem in the US There have been discussions of the cultural ‘corruption’ of the young members of the nation back into antiquity. The crime for which Socrates was put to death, for example, was ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’ with politically and religiously subversive forms of knowledge (see Plato Apology 24-27). Yet historians have documented that a distinct genre of writing has emerged in Europe and America since the early eighteenth century, which addresses the danger posed to young people by impure and corrupting cultural forms, which threaten to shape their sexuality in inappropriate ways (Foucault [1975] 2003; Cooter 1992; Cunningham 1996; Heywood 2007). These historians have argued that, in the modern period in Europe and America, state-sponsored medical and pedagogic institutions have worked to purify the national population, improving its health, well-being and productivity. Among other significant objects, these institutions have concerned themselves with the study, protection and regulation of childhood – depicted as a period of fragile innocence and purity, ever vulnerable to contamination. In particular, child sexuality 2 became a key site through which the fundamental nature of the future adult could be monitored and shaped in order to avoid later sexual and social abnormality. From the nineteenth century in Europe and America, this potential danger justified continual social and medical supervision of the child, to ensure that an inappropriate form of sexuality did not intrude upon its natural innocence. This justification for continual supervision offered social and political institutions a twofold benefit. On the one hand, they could justify intervention to reshape the family or society in the name of childhood, as an ideal of purity. On the other hand, the child as an object of concern could be used to manage the regulation and optimisation of the future national population. Responsibility for the supervision and cultivation of the child’s innocence was socially and legally placed, in the first instance, in the hands of parents, with the supervising apparatus of educational and medical experts positioned as ‘the modern parent’s modern parent’ (Hulbert 2004: 36). The family was discursively constructed as a site of domestic purity and private happiness, mandated to service the bodily and emotional needs of adults and to protect and cultivate children. In historically situating present discourses regarding the sexualization of young people, however, it is notable that the term ‘sexualization’ itself was not a common part of Anglophone discourse until recent decades. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the term was infrequently drawn upon by English writers to refer the assignation of a gendered frame to a particular object, such as the gendering of nouns (e.g. de Quincey [1839] 1909: 195). By contrast the term ‘asexualization’ saw greater use, as a synonym for sterilisation in eugenics discourse from around the turn of the twentieth century (e.g. Lydston 1904). ‘Sexualization’ began to see more frequent, though quite specialised, deployment in post-war biomedical discourse in the US and UK. Here it referred to the gendering of anatomic elements and/or their activation in adulthood for the purposes of reproduction (e.g. D’Ancona 1945; Ionescu et al. 1971). The term started to gain additional forms of signification and a more general discursive mobilisation in the US from the early 1970s. ‘Sexualization’ emerged as a relatively common term in journalistic and academic writing, used to refer to the way a particular person, space or process became characterised or distributed by gendered sexuality (e.g. Chesney-Lind 1974). In this regard, ‘sexualization’ was situated as a 3 portmanteau of the words ‘sexual socialization’, and was mobilised to discuss the process of normal gender development to adulthood (e.g. Spanier 1975). A related discursive formation, though distinct, was the mobilisation of the term ‘sexualization’ within a strand of the American psychoanalytic literature. The term had been used in Anglophone psychoanalytic discourse since early twentieth-century translations of Freud’s concept of ‘sexualizieren’ to refer to the way that a particular drive is attached to an erotic love-object. Beginning in the 1970s, however, American psychoanalysts began to use the term to refer more precisely to the utilisation of sexual desire, not primarily as a source of pleasure, but as a defence mechanism to protect the subject from anxiety – as for example in some cases of strong sexual attraction to the therapist (e.g. Kohut 1971; Stolorow 1975). At the intersection between these two types of usage, ‘sexualization’ became used to refer to a form of socialisation received by young people, which resulted in inappropriate forms of sexual desire for adult love-objects (e.g. Kleeman 1971). This articulation became much stronger when, with the advent of widespread public concern regarding child sexual abuse in the late 1970s, the term began to be mobilised in the US to discuss incest (e.g. Summit & Kryso 1978; Finkelhor 1978). Medical and social science researchers generally deployed ‘sexualization’ to refer to a liminal zone between sexual abuse and normal family life, in which the child’s relationship with their parents was characterised by an ‘excessive’, improper sexuality, though without recognisable forms of abuse having occurred. Sometimes, however, the dysfunctional and developmentally inappropriate effects of abuse – i.e. the consequences of abuse as sexual mal-socialisation – were also referred to as ‘sexualization’, or as ‘traumatic sexualization’ (following Finkelhor & Browne 1985), in this medical and social scientific literature. This clinical mobilisation of the term ‘sexualization’ has continued into the present, even as wider policy and media discourses have taken up and redeployed the concept. For instance, Crittenden (2008: 166) has written of ‘spousification’ as a process in which ‘the child is brought up to an adult position. Often the relationship has sexualized features, but not necessarily sexually abusive ones.’ This sustained clinical discourse on sexualization as a liminal state of abuse should not be seen as unrelated to the policy and media discourses which have also 4 used the term; as we shall see, media and political discourses have made strategic use of the potential of the term ‘sexualization’ to hint at this clinical meaning of the sexual damage and distortion of children. Such narratives have been facilitated, though certainly not determined, by the term ‘sexualization’ itself. A peculiarity of many action nouns such as ‘sexualization’, which are made from transitive verbs through the addition of ‘-ation’, is that they designate both actions or processes and their result (this can be seen, for instance, in the nouns ‘accusation’ or ‘starvation’, which are both an action/process and the result). The term ‘sexualization’ is derived from ‘sexual’ as a noun stem, with ‘-ation’ at the head following the suffix ‘-ize’ which makes the word a process of endowment. This is mirrored in the retention of the stress contours of the stem in its passage to action noun: ‘sexual’ becomes ‘sexualization’. ‘Sexualization’ therefore signifies a passive process in which the base noun, ‘sexuality’, is transferred at a given time (the same effect can be seen in other cases, such as ‘institutionalisation’ or ‘generalisation’). Unless qualified, any degree of ‘sexualization’ will therefore imply the endowment of a ‘sexual’ property to the direct object – whether this be ‘the relation with the love-object’ in 1970s psychoanalytic discourse or, as we shall see, ‘the girl’ in contemporary discourses on sexual morality and young people. As a portmanteau, ‘sexualization’ brings into ‘disjunctive synthesis’ (Deleuze [1969] 1990: 55), in a mismatched and imprecise way two powerful themes: ‘socialisation’ as a passive process of enculturation that occurs during youth, and the ‘sexual’ as any aspect of gender identity, physical development or erotic desires and experiences. Discursive transformations The growth of public concern about child abuse in the 1970s was perhaps the most significant of the discursive factors that laid the ground for the remarkable shift in the problematisation of ‘sexualization’, which had moved from a specialised clinical term into a recognised social problem by the early 1980s. The issue of child abuse was initially brought into the public eye in the mid-1970s by radical-feminist groups and feminist social workers and psychologists. This period is generally known 5 as ‘second wave’ feminism, in contrast to the ‘first wave’ of the suffrage campaigners. Among the different feminist positions that comprised the ‘second wave’, radicalfeminists treated male patriarchy as the main obstacle to female emancipation. They argued that a broad regime of gender power was built out of and naturalised by practices in the course of everyday life, such as sexual harassment at work or in the home. It was also from the discourses of the radical feminists that the rape victim emerged as a key figure for feminist discourses. The rape victim symbolically and strategically encapsulated the position of all women dominated and exploited by patriarchy, continually subject to a whole variety of social, sexual and economic violations by men. Emerging from a dialogue between British and American radical feminists, the figure of the abused child was elaborated in the 1970s out of this concern with rape and patriarchal power within the home (Echols 1989). As historians of the period have noted, this abused child was often constructed in Anglophone feminist discourses as ‘innocent’, in a substantive state of sexual and moral purity (see Walkerdine 1997; Hacking 1999; Lamb 1999; Davis 2005). The purity of the female child was emphasised in 1970s and 1980s Anglophone radical-feminist discourses to highlight both the moral impurity of a patriarchal and capitalist culture, and the sexual exploitation of children by their fathers which has been facilitated by the powerimbalances of family life. These discourses proposed that incest was not caused by sexual young women, but by ‘innocence betrayed’ by patriarchal rape-culture (Forward & Buck 1978: 19; see also Rush 1980; Herman 1981; Ward 1985; Fredrickson 1992). However other feminists, such as Kitzinger (1988), Bell (1993) and Lamb (1999) began to express concern, arguing that the position of the innocent child as a symbol of femininity had started to backfire. They suggested that it had inadvertently had the effect of infantilising women, legitimising an emerging ‘New Right’ rhetoric in Anglophone countries that demanded the protection and control of women as part of a return to ‘traditional family values’. For example, authors such as Pride (1986) mobilised the figure of the innocent girl, threatened by abuse, to attack the legalisation of abortion as a form of child abuse. 6 This discursive formation provided the social conditions of possibility for the emergence of what can perhaps be recognised as our present problematization of ‘sexualization’, and its articulation with discourses of purity and impurity. From 1981, articles began to appear in the US public sphere, from journalists and academics, decrying the sudden ‘sexualization’ of young girls in contemporary culture. ‘Sexualization’ was used to describe a mal-socialisation, which separates children from their natural essence by causing their premature entry into adult forms of sexual subjectivity. The first of these articles, and an anchor for the subsequent genre of texts, was an article in the New York Times, which investigated the response of parents to the marketing of ‘play cosmetics’ for girls (Schiro 1981). The article cites Jack Forcelledo, executive vice president of Remco, who states that his company have ‘identified a major opportunity in the marketplace - a tremendous potential for us’. However Peggy Charren, of the group Action for Children's Television, is quoted as arguing that encouraging girls to play with make-up ‘pushes them into growing up. It's part of taking childhood away from children’. Deirdre Bergson, a schoolteacher and parent, stated that commercial culture was ‘priming girls’, and that the ‘problem’ with the play cosmetics was that they were ‘all about the ‘sexualization’ of little girls’. From the 1990s, there emerged a new genre of texts on sexualization, redeploying feminist critiques of gender power into a moral reading of sex and childhood: child-rearing manuals for parents. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Garbarino’s (1995) Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment. Garbarino, a professor of child development at Cornell University and a social campaigner for children’s rights, draws on the metaphor of toxicity to discuss the special vulnerability that the purity of childhood has to contaminating cultural representations. He argues that ‘an environment is becoming socially toxic when we observe an erosion of middle-class childhood. Childhood is the measuring stick for assessing social changes’ (1995: 16): The U.N. convention is an effort to express a universal definition of what it should mean to be a child, a universal definition based on what middleclass societies have learned about children and child development... it 7 proposes that to be a child is to be shielded from the direct demands of adult economic, political, and sexual forces (1995: 7-8). Garbarino contends, for example, that since children ‘are not sexual unless corrupted by adults or adolescents’, the innocence of modern children is contaminated when they ‘are sexualized by the sexuality that pervades the imagery on television and the movies’ (1995: 11, 39). This puts them at risk of adult sexual attention, since ‘dressing children like adults sends a message’ that they are no longer ‘off-limits’ (1995: 11). Garbarino’s Raising Children is a significant text in the genealogy of contemporary sexualization discourses. Firstly, the text provided a model for later prescriptive works offering practical advice on child-rearing to parents regarding children, sexuality and culture. It brought together the realms of psychology, social commentary and parenting to produce authoritative discourses on normality and abnormality, innocence and corruption, positioning the advice provided by the text as a needed supplement to the practices of parents. Secondly, Raising Children was the first text to make the now-common articulation between discourses of sexualization and environmental discourses on chemical toxicity, anchoring claims about the social and moral value of particular cultural representations in quite credible and apocalyptic narratives linking nature, purity and pollution. Thirdly, the text is an early instance of a common movement within sexualization discourses from accounts of the essence of childhood to biopolitical judgements regarding who can be considered truly human. Garbarino proposes that children ‘become more fully human’, more ‘good and normal’, if granted the enculturation provided by middle-class norms regarding childhood, which ‘provide a social context for children in which each can bear the fruits of human evolution’ (1995: 6, 12-3). Feminist discourses in the media on ‘girls’ as minors Though the overall narrative arc of discourse on sexualization remained the same as it had been in the 1990s, from 2003-2005 ‘sexualization’ came to be positioned by a number of discursive actors as a feminist issue. This is not to say that a single 8 ‘feminist perspective on sexualization’ emerged in this period; among discursive actors mobilising feminist discourses, or identifying themselves explicitly with feminism, there were a host of different views. Yet a particular, relatively cohesive position emerged after 2003 among a number of media discourses: these discourses tended to emphasise that, in the context of a commercialised and sexist culture, young women are unable to exercise meaningful choice even when they experience themselves as doing so. These media actors, in their problematization of sexualization, positioned themselves as the true heirs to the feminist tradition and its critical insights, in contrast to contemporary youth. These avowedly feminist media discourses argued that sexualization was contaminating the sexual subjectivity and values of young people, encouraging selfexploitation and the re-embedding of patriarchal forms of gendered power (e.g. LaFerla 2003; Pollet & Hurwitz 2004; Haynes 2005; Levy 2005; Dalton 2005). Female consumption has been re-packaged by commercial interests as feminine empowerment such that women are presented with images of female agency that appear powerful, but which are in fact heteronormative, depoliticised, and granted insufficient capacity to actively desire. Sexualization causes immense harm to young women and therefore represents a pressing social problem, requiring psychological oversight and state intervention, particularly through the implementation of comprehensive sex education in state-run schools. Dalton (2005), for instance, expressed concern that ‘women once complained about being reduced to sex objects. Now, their daughters are volunteering to be sex objects... these girls seem whole but they aren’t. There is often a lost little girl inside.’ Moreover, in making children legitimate objects of attraction for adult males, sexualization was depicted as thereby providing a source of legitimacy for child abuse and international child sex trafficking: ‘Such dress prompts the child to imitate adult female behavior that she doesn't understand. This can short-circuit normal development. It can also encourage older children and adults to relate to these young girls as sexual beings, sometimes with tragic consequences’ (Dalton 2005). These feminist media commentators mobilised the figure of ‘the girl’ that had emerged in feminist thinking from the mid-1990s. In part this figure was anchored in 9 the discourses of feminist developmental psychologists regarding the loss of teenage girls’ sense of agency and their ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ selves in contemporary sexist culture (Brown & Gilligan 1992: 5; Pipher 1994). However, the ‘girl’ had also served since the late 1990s as a crucial symbolic boundary separating different modes of feminist theorising, as Baumgardner and Richards (2004) have noted. A debate occurred within academic feminism over whether radical feminism had been too pessimistic about the possibilities of re-balancing relations of gender power, producing a disempowering and fatalist narrative. Within this debate, young feminist writers such as Walker (1995) and Findlen (1995) described themselves as ‘girls’, combating the constraints of the ‘second wave’ radical-feminism of their ‘mothers’ and representing a new generation of feminist theorists in a more emancipated culture. The ‘girl’ became a key site of debate in feminist theory, as a symbol for the question of whether ‘second wave’ theory was out of date as an account of the damage done to the subjectivity of women by sexist cultural forms (Henry 2004). In addressing ‘girls’, feminist theory could address itself to the subjectivation of women. This focus on the ‘girl’ as a metaphor for subjectivation was retained by the feminist media discourses problematising sexualization; however, a concern for ‘girls’ as children simultaneously highlighted the youth and vulnerability of the person suffering harm, making their discourses more incendiary. Commentators in the early 2000s also noted that the problematization of sexualization in the American public sphere was anchored in discourses from prior feminist theorising. In their article on the dangers of sexualization in The Nation (an American left-wing weekly periodical), Pollet and Hurwitz (2004), for example, note that discourses on sexualization replayed long-standing feminist debates regarding the true meaning of gendered oppression and agency, though with a striking difference in the object of analysis: It's a debate whose terms are familiar, from the feminist sex wars of the 1980s to the 1990s rise of ‘girl power’ in pop culture to the explosion of feminist cultural criticism that snubbed the old-school women's movement for its perceived lack of an ironic sensibility. But the discussion has 10 acquired a new dimension now that a mass-marketed ideal of female sexiness derived from stripper culture is being sold to an ever younger set. These loyal feminist discourses fed directly into the American Psychological Association Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls (2007), which states that it ‘was formed in response to these expressions of public concern’ from ‘journalists, child advocacy organizations, parents, and psychologists’, citing a number of the texts mentioned above. I have considered the APA report elsewhere, and for now only wish to present its argument in brief since my primary focus here in on media discourses (see also Lerum and Dworkin 2009a, b). In what would become an influential codification, the Taskforce argued that: Sexualization occurs when [1.] a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; [2.] a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; [3.] a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; [4] and/or sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person (2007: 2). The APA report restated the loyal feminist narrative on the threat posed by sexualization that had emerged in the US media in 2003-5, though it buttressed this narrative through appeal to psychological research. The central argument of the report is that, ‘in the current environment’, ‘teen girls’ are encouraged to ‘look sexy’ – though ‘they know little about what it means to be sexual, to have sexual desires, and to make rational and responsible decisions’. The authors express concern that ‘younger girls imbued with adult sexuality may seem sexually appealing, and this may suggest their sexual availability’ (2007: 3). Around the same time as the APA report, there began to emerge a large number of popular parenting guides written by child advocates and academic developmental psychologists, appropriating and re-deploying feminist discourses on sexualization as 11 an issue of gender power (examples include Lamb & Brown 2006; Levin & Kilbourne 2008; Opplinger 2008; Durham 2009; Olfman 2009). For example, in Girls Gone Skank, Opplinger (2008: 205) wrote that ‘instead of embracing the gains made by their foremothers and continuing the fight for empowerment, many females today are choosing to participate in their own sexual exploitation. They are offering their bodies to men in exchange for attention and acceptance’, which puts all women at risk by sending a message to men that women, even girls, find pleasure in being treated as sexual objects (cf. Lamb 2010). However, as well as this mobilisation by child advocates and developmental psychologists, these loyal feminist discourses on sexualization as a cultural corruption of innocence have also received widespread support and redeployment from rightwing social commentators and journalists in the US. The latter have constructed discourses on sexualization as recognition by the psychological establishment and by members of the Left that public morality has become debased, and that the necessary solution is a tighter parental regulation of female sexuality and steps to ensure that girls themselves work to maintain their innocence and health (Stepp 2007). Liebau (2007: 11, 230), for example, situated herself as fighting sexualization by trying to ‘figure out how to restore the notion of sexual innocence to girlhood’ in the face of its erosion by ‘greater interaction among American’s social classes and races, and more sexual license’. Women even carry condoms today, undermining their natural role as ‘sexual limit setters’ (2007: 189). She decries the sexualization that occurs in ‘underprivileged, African-American households’ in which ‘no one teaches these girls about modesty’ by informing them that the clothes they wear serves as a message to men – either of purity or sexual availability (2007: 147, 242). The emergence of media discourses on sexualization in Britain British discourses were occasioned, in part, by prior discourses on the issue in the US. However, as Jenkins (1998: 232) and Critcher (2003) have documented, social problem discourses rarely transplant in this matter without the activity of ‘domestic constituencies’ who have an interest in taking up the narrative. A shared mobilisation 12 of discourses on sexualization, therefore, can be seen as the result of equivalent sociostructural issues in both settings: American concerns would be accepted and ‘naturalised’ in Britain only if they struck a chord among a significant sector of British society... Parallels between British and American movements can be seen in part as common responses to similar underlying social and economic trends, which have affected the entire Western world to differing degrees (Jenkins 1992: 2256). Discourses of ‘sexualization’ emerged later in Britain than in the US, though they also followed the same general pattern: beginning as a liminal form of sexual abuse, sexualization became problematised as a wider social issue associated with the malsocialization of young people by the media. Among the first mobilisations of the term in Britain on record, in 1988 a judge presiding over a case of potential child sexual abuse ruled that: It was clear from the reports of the interview and the oral evidence at the hearing that the child had become sexualized by vulgar and inappropriate horseplay with the father, but that it was highly improbable that the father had indulged in those activities for his own sexual gratification or that there had been sexual abuse in the full sense (C vs C Child Abuse, [1988] 1 FLR 462). A second significant mobilisation of the term occurred in 1991. Nine children were taken away from their families by social services in February 1991 following accusations of ritualistic Satanic sexual abuse on the island of Orkney, in Scotland. These accusations were based on forensic interviewing methods propounded in the US (e.g. Macfarlane & Waterman 1986) which assumed an absence of sexual subjectivity in ‘normal’ children, and thus the certain presence of sexual abuse in cases where children described, even loosely, events taken to be of a sexual nature. In the public 13 inquiry that followed the case being dismissed, the Glasgow Herald reported that the social worker who had cared for the children on their return flight to the island found his young charges ‘more graphically sexual than he would have expected’, as a result of having been ‘sexualized’ by their experiences in the trial and with ‘the protective organisations’ (Glasgow Herald 1992). The C vs C trial and the coverage of the children returning home following the Orkney Satanic abuse case, are two early instances in Britain where ‘sexualization’ was used to refer to the liminal zone between normality and sexual abuse. Yet the term ‘sexualization’ began to shift in meaning in late 1992 and throughout 1993 in a series of articles in The Independent, discussing adolescent sexuality and threats to childhood innocence. The Independent, founded only a few years before in 1986, was then a broadsheet publication aiming to contribute a distinctive voice on the centre-left of British politics (between The Guardian on the left and The Times in the centre). In an article of November 1992, for example, Dr. Fay Hutchinson of the London Brook Advisory Centre is cited as arguing for the need for more effective sex education, to protect girls from the pregnancies that follow from ‘an explicit sexualization of our young people. We allow them adult clothes and adult things’ when in fact ‘at 13 and 14 these girls are more at the stage of needing to love puppies and kittens. At this age girls like fluffy toys’ (Hall 1992). In April 1993, The Independent condemned the ‘little-girl look’ adopted by the then nineteen-yearold model Kate Moss in a photo-shoot for Vogue. The article stated that ‘the magazine has sanctioned images that resonate with the sexualization of children. That is irresponsible. Sexual abuse of the young is a harrowing truth of our times’ (Hume 1993) The diversity of feminist mobilisations of ‘sexualization’ In the British press, ‘sexualization’ came increasingly to refer to a social and moral corruption of girls by impure sexual representations in the commercial media. There was a strong focus on girls in this narrative (see Aaronovitch 1996), since any girl showing signs of adult sexuality was constructed as ‘mainstreaming’ the abnormal 14 predilections of adult sexual predators, thereby making every child more vulnerable to sexual abuse. Hanson (1996) wrote in The Independent that the ‘sexualisation of children's clothes’: ... gives all sorts of strange messages. I hate seeing children done up in what are really caricatures of sexy adults' clothes suggesting an identity that isn't part of childhood - very tight, black and shimmery and glittery. I think mothers have a responsibility to ensure that children have a childhood. The younger the child is, the more complicated. There are people who have confused boundaries about sexuality and I don't think we should put opportunity in their way (Hanson 1996). Similarly, Smith (2008) argued that, as a result of their consumption of distorting and inauthentic cultural representations, ‘teenage girls’ do not have access to the ‘feminist’ counter-discourses that will ‘allow them to be themselves’: I worry that there has been a generational slip - that a generation of teenage girls has missed out on feminist ideas and is having to deal with an increasingly exploitative culture without the tools to look beyond the surface glitter (Smith 2008). Such media discourses represent a problematization that can be identified as equivalent to the US feminist media discourses, positioning sexualization as a corruption of young women by sexist cultural forms such that their commercial and sexual choices do not count as meaningful but rather are the effects of their cultural oppression. For instance, Roberts (2003) began her article ‘Cheated Out of Childhood’ with an identification of the US origins of her problematisation: The New York Times calls it 'whores wars' - the battle that marks the beginning of the school year when eight-year-olds shop for their winter wardrobe. Most parents want clothes that work for children; the kids 15 demand the lapdancers' gear and Beyoncé bits that pass for junior playground chic. The impact of the tartification of childhood - the relentless sexualisation of the young and the determination of the market to hook them into moneymaking adolescence as soon as they toddle from the cradle - is now beginning to seep through even the toughest of parental fortifications. So what price the future of the unprotected? In these feminist media discourses on sexualization, a common narrative can be discerned regarding the cultural corruption of girls by a misogynistic culture, with the result that their sexual and commercial choices cannot be recognised as meaningful agency. Yet the diversity of feminist mobilisations of the issue of ‘sexualization’ must be recognised. In particular, a crucial opposition lies between those discourses that focused primarily on gendered relations of power and those that made undifferentiated claims about the dangers of sex to girls. I have addressed elsewhere the role of the Papadopoulos Review on the Sexualisation of Young People (2010) in taking elements of a feminist narrative on sexualization as gender power, and denaturing them through the undifferentiated construction of young women as equivalent to children in lacking the capacity for meaningful choice (Duschinsky 2013a). I have also discussed elsewhere the way in which academic feminist texts, such as the work of Gill (2008) and McRobbie (2009) attempt to use the term ‘sexualization’ to address gender power, but risk sliding into an insufficiently differentiated critique of female sexuality (Duschinsky 2013b). Here I would like to concentrate on media discourses. Toynbee’s (2008) article, for example, slides in her discussion of sexualization from a discussion of gender power into a discussion of the inappropriate signification of sexual desire in children. Toynbee argued that ‘girlification is destroying all the hope we felt in 1968’, a year that for her symbolises the aim of the feminist project of rearranging in a less oppressive way ‘elemental things between women and men and families’. Yet instead of remaining faithful to second wave feminism, young women are becoming ‘sexualised’. She re-asserted the feminist message that ‘equal pay and 16 equal power are closely connected with an escape from princess pink. Can I really be writing this still, now? After all those years?’ Toynbee’s article used the term ‘sexualization’ primarily to refer to the restrictive gendered norms shaping young female subjectivities, though she slides into a discussion under the same rubric of the inappropriate combination of sexual signifiers and childhood. Thus she described ‘pink, pink everywhere - and it damages girls' brains. That's before you start on thongs for seven-year-olds and sexy slogans on three-year-olds' T-shirts. A report from the American Psychological Association shows how sexualisation harms girls - and it's getting worse, more of it and more extreme.’ A less ambivalent example is Alibhai-Brown (2009), who described herself as a ‘left-of-centre commentator’ and ‘a defender of the rights of women and girls’. Yet she stated that it is ‘no betrayal of what I have always believed in’ to characterise comprehensive sex education as a ‘sexualisation’ of children. She stated that ‘for an old feminist like me, the gains we made were many, but we have failed to equip young females with the tools they need to withstand the pressures put on them’. For AlibhaiBrown it is ‘quite scandalous that the fourth richest nation in the world is still unable to find its moral centre and to prevent such levels of sexual incontinence and irresponsibility’. Of all the problems facing women in contemporary British society, Alibhai-Brown (2011) added in a later article that ‘the sexualisation of young women is proving the most effective whip against female progress’, and makes for ‘a poisonous environment in which to be a woman’. The responsible right-wing Yet following their emergence in The Independent in the early 1990s, discourses on sexualization have also been mobilised within the right-wing tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, and to a degree in the centre-right broadsheet Daily Telegraph. The feminist media discourses on sexualization as a corruption of girls, situated as minors, had the unintended consequence of facilitating right-wing support and co-option of the issue of sexualization, with the regulation of female sexuality situated as a matter of morality and public decency. 17 Parents, generally mothers, are addressed by such a narrative as agents with a pressing imperative to protect and regulate their innocent children in the context of sexual threats from outside the home (see e.g. Appleyard 1998; Shakinovsky 2002; Jones 2002; Poulter 2010). These discourses suggested that sexualization served to express and further contribute to the destruction of national public morality. In an early and indicative instance of this framing, an editorial in The Daily Mail (The Daily Mail, 10th June 1993) mobilised the issue of sexualization to castigate the irresponsibility of those who would critically discuss representations of childhood innocence and purity. The editorial argued that ‘in expressing this opinion publicly’ (that not all adolescent girls should be conceptualised as innocent and pure), a speaker is ‘giving the green light to paedophiles’ in the context of ‘the “sexualisation” of children and pre-pubescent girls’ (cf. The Independent, 2nd August 1994). Besides their association with right-wing media outlets, these narratives that problematize sexualization as moral decline can be identified as oriented by a ‘rightwing’ political agenda. I am aware that essential meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ do not exist outside of discourse, and that therefore my own identification of a particular narrative with the contemporary Anglophone ‘right’ cannot be seen as a politicallyneutral move. I justify my analysis on the basis that narratives concerned above all with the moral decline of national culture caused by the immorality of women have long been identified by social and political scientists as a strategy characteristic of Anglophone ‘right-wing’ discursive actors, without supposing that all right-wing actors will use such a narrative (see e.g. Eatwell & O’Sullivan 1990). Whereas loyal feminist discourses positioned themselves as primarily concerned with the well-being of girls, right-wing discourses on sexualization expressed concern primarily with the breach of (gendered) norms of propriety and moral decency. Within these narratives of moral decline, a ‘basic’ and an ‘elaborated’ position on sexualization can be discerned. The ‘basic’ position on the issue of sexualization has been a tale of moral decline as caused by the spread of personal immorality and deviant practices. For example, Julian Brazier, then Conservative MP for Canterbury, placed ‘sexualisation’ as both the cause and consequence of an amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill 1998 that would lower the age of consent for homosexuals to 18 match that of heterosexuals (Pierce 1998). Yet an elaboration upon this basic rightwing position has emerged since the early 2000s; from the perspective of social theory, it can be identified as a ‘neo-liberal’ framing. I shall term this neo-liberal problematization of sexualization ‘responsible right-wing’ discourses, since it has been closely associated with their construction of a need for adults to take responsibility for their children, and the state for the well-being of the nation, in the context of a widespread breakdown in societal, familial and personal value-systems. In one of the first such instances of the ‘responsible right-wing’ narrative, The Daily Mail mobilised the problematization of the sexualization to castigate the irresponsibility those who would critically discuss representations of childhood innocence and purity. The editorial argued that ‘in expressing this opinion publicly’ a speaker is ‘giving the green light to paedophiles’, in the context of ‘the 'sexualization' of children and pre-pubescent girls’ in contemporary ‘consumer society’ (Daily Mail 1993; cf. the response by The Independent 1994). By the late 1990s, this ‘responsible right-wing’ narrative mobilised sexualization to suggest the contamination of moral values in society, the breakdown of the nuclear family, and the lack of adult ‘responsibility’: Children who watch a procession of boyfriends in and out of their mother's bed learn from this experience that sex, impermanence and instant gratification go together.... It is only if we end our culture of adult irresponsibility that we will restore childhood innocence, whose destruction is so shockingly in evidence (Phillips 2002). In situating sexualization as a spread of moral and sexual impurity within contemporary society, these narratives from actors in right-wing and centre-right newspaper outlets also often positioned themselves as the heirs to second wave ‘feminist’ ethical insights: One can't help but wonder what happened to feminism and its lessons. On the one hand, girls drink like men; on the other they dress in a manner that 19 invites sexual objectification. Do these young girls even know what feminism is? 'The problem is that teenagers have rejected the values of the previous era and to reject the values of the Sixties or Seventies, which was very laissezfaire, you have to go very far,' says Dr Pat Spungin, psychologist and founder of parenting website raisingkids.co.uk. The bar has unquestionably been raised. Where will it end? In bizarre fetishism or S&M as teens strive to outdo each other? (Lichtenstein 2009). A significant actor in the shaping of this ‘responsible right-wing’ problematization of sexualization has been David Cameron, now Prime Minister of Britain. Soon after his election to the role of Leader of the Opposition, he positioned his party against the ‘harmful and creepy’ sexualization of young girls. Against critics who had accused him of an overly libertarian approach to market-forces, the Leader of the Opposition asserted that he was willing to enact regulation if was for the sake of the innocence of childhood: Like many parents I talk to, I'm concerned by the impact on children of the increasingly aggressive interface of commercialisation and sexualization. I have no desire to wrap kids in cotton wool: growing up is about finding out what goes on in the real world. But the protection of childhood innocence against premature sexualization is something worth fighting for (Cameron, cited in Crerar 2006). In such discourses on sexualization, the figure of ‘the child’ is mobilised to draw a symbolic boundary within discourses on the ‘responsible’ subject, placing as a legal and social minor those young women who are not seen as capable of making appropriate and socially beneficial decisions. Though ‘there is nothing – literally nothing – you wouldn’t do to protect’ children (Cameron 2009), this account demands the withdrawal of protections from adults: ‘do we want a country where politicians, bureaucrats and the powers-that-be treat everyone like children who are incapable of taking their own decisions and taking responsibility for their lives? Or do we want a 20 country where we treat adults like adults, and give them more power and more responsibility over their lives?’ (Cameron, in Morris 2011). The issue of sexualization has recently been headlined as the centre of the British Coalition government policy on families and children. The Coalition’s Programme for Government, issued by the Cabinet Office in May 2010, stated that since’ strong and stable families of all kinds are the bedrock of a strong and stable society’, the Government must ‘take action to protect children from excessive commercialisation and premature sexualisation’ (Cabinet Office 2010: 19). An Early Day Motion was proposed by the Conservative MP David Morris in November 2010 which praised the Mothers’ Union for their campaign on the issue of the ‘commercialisation of childhood’. In response, on the 6th of December 2010, the Coalition government commissioned a new report from the Mothers’ Union on the sexualization of young people to recommend practical changes in government legislation on the issue. This new inquiry was ‘led by Reg Bailey, chief executive of Christian charity the Mothers’ Union’ (Carlin 2010). I have treated the Bailey Review in two other articles (Barker & Duschinsky 2012; Duschinsky & Barker 2012), so will draw my genealogy of media discourses to a close here. Concluding reflections Egan and Hawkes (2008a, b) have contended that discourses on the sexualization of young people headline threats to ‘children’, but focus their attention on the need to regulate post-pubescent middle-class white girls, and use statistics which have as their sample late teenagers or a group of adult women undifferentiated by age. Through this sleight-of-hand, sexualization discourses treat female sexual agency as impure and pathological. Egan and Hawkes have proposed that such discourses on sexualization and the production of seductive subjectivities contribute to the ongoing construction and policing of social status: they are mobilised as a way of policing the symbolic boundaries between middle-class and working-class culture. Drawing inspiration from Egan and Hawkes, Buckingham and Bragg have also examined discourses on sexualization, with a particular focus on the British case and 21 building from their prior focus-group research (2003) on the discourses of parents and children regarding their media consumption. In The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing, commissioned by the British Government, Buckingham expressed grave concern regarding the ‘sensationalised and moralistic terms’ of the debate on sexualization (2009: 113). He suggested that the framing of ‘sexualisation’ makes strategic use of a conflation between ‘sexualised’ and ‘sexual’ content, and the disjuncture between reality and an imputed ‘sense of what children should be’. In this way a persuasive account has been forged of ‘the corruption of childhood innocence’ by ‘campaigners with much broader moral, religious or political motivations’ (2009: 114-5). In Sexualised Goods Aimed at Children (2010), commissioned by the Scottish Government, Buckingham and colleagues agreed with media and policy discourses on sexualization that sexual content is now more prominently displayed in the public sphere. Buckingham et al. (2010) found that the white-British, middle-class parents in their interviews strategically mobilised discourses on sexualization in the training of their children in proper behaviour, appropriate to their social position. Discourses of innocence and corruption are primarily mobilised in order to manage the education of children in appropriate choice-making. Buckingham and Bragg argued that the fundamental stakes of sexualization discourses are this ability to regulate one’s choices appropriately, and to position oneself successfully and safely as a classed, raced and gendered subject (2010: 22, 32, 37; Buckingham 2000: 135). In their focus group research, a state of ‘sexualisation’ was only ever attributed by children and parents to others, with these others derided in age and class terms as ‘immature’ or ‘chavs’. Psychological discourses on the threat of sexualization to mental health were seen as highly ‘unconvincing’ to parents in the focus groups. Buckingham and Bragg suggested that the central concern that parents had with scandalous media representations and forms of consumption was less the effects they would cause in their children than what they would signify to others, and the social or sexual danger in which these significations may put their child (2003: 83, 181; 2010: 25, 36). In particular, parents were anxious about their daughters engaging in forms of consumption or practices situated as ‘sexual’, as this was seen to risk removing the 22 attribution of ‘propriety’ that protected their daughters from the accusation of having solicited sexual advances by men (2010: 25-6, 33-5). The genealogical account of the US and UK helps to shed further light on problematisations of sexualization. Kennedy (1993: 182-3), commenting with great acuity on discourses on sexualization in the early 1990s in the US, noted that the themes of purity and impurity mobilised by these discourses have tributaries in the various components of the discursive coalition supporting the stabilisation of ‘sexualization’ as a social problem. He suggested that this discursive coalition comprised ‘neopuritan traditionalism (sex = danger of sin)’, ‘neopuritan feminism (sex = danger of abuse)’, and a middle-ground of ‘liberal patriarchy’ for whom ‘clean and dirty sex [are and should remain] naturally separate’. Building upon Kennedy’s insight, discourses on sexualization can be considered as a ‘discursive coalition’: an ‘ensemble of 1) a set of story-lines; 2) the actors who utter these story-lines; and 3) the practices in which this discursive activity is based’ (Hajer 1995: 65). The story-lines of sexualization tell of an innocent young girl, threatened by the intrusion of corrupting cultural forms. They also tell of the need for adults to protect young people from this danger, through the careful regulation of their attitudes and choices. Discourses on sexualization, in speaking of corruption, tell of what in fact is the natural state of young women. The construction of the threat posed by sexualization is grounded in and legitimates practices that regulate the choices of young women, positioned as unable to stand as adequate cultural agents. Despite their convergent narratives, the different components of the discursive coalition should not be regarded as having presented the same account. Loyal feminist constructions of ‘sexualisation’ have used the concept to express concern about the sexual subjectification of women. They have, further, questioned the possibilities for meaningful female sexual agency in a misogynistic culture. Their narrative regarding the distance of ‘girls’ from their imputed essence addresses itself to the developmental, cultural process through which women becomes subjects, whilst also supporting their claims about the difficulties of meaningful agency for women. The ‘girl’ has therefore served as a substitute figure for addressing the oppression of women. By contrast, right-wing contributors to the discursive coalition have found the 23 concept of ‘sexualisation’ apt for addressing the threat posed by the ‘inappropriate’ behaviour of young women to cultural and moral norms. In particular, ‘responsible right-wing’ discourses have made use of the construction of ‘girls’ as using their freedoms irresponsibly to argue for a ‘return’ to ‘responsibility’ in British society, contrasting the innocence of girls in their natural state to their lewd, sexualised practices in contemporary society. Egan and Hawkes have pointed out that discourses on ‘sexualisation’ have tended to conflate young women with children, constructing a pressing need to protect middle-class young women from forms of culture seen as contaminating, and undermining the possibility of meaningful female sexual agency outside of marriage. Buckingham and Bragg have drawn upon their qualitative research to argue that sexualisation discourses can be seen as a social practice for the regulation of young people as choice-making subjects. Building from these studies, and now my genealogical account offered above, I would contend that feminist media narratives on sexualization as the cultural contamination of girls, situated as minors, have proposed measures to regulate and nurture female sexuality and desire. In doing so they have, unintentionally, offered support to right-wing discourses that demand the regulation of female sexuality – as a key biopolitical site for normalising the present and the future reproductive, social and economic life of the family, social class, and the nation. This has been recognised by some of the feminist discursive actors who first helped problematize ‘sexualization’. Moore (2011) has argued in The Guardian that ‘the awkward encounter between the right and feminism is premised on this daft word, sexualisation’. She suggested that it has drawn attention away from the ‘the real but difficult questions’ of material and gender inequalities by making the issue the destruction of ‘innocence’ represented by the sexuality and desire of young people. The contribution of feminist discourses to the media and policy concerns, she contended, has been less to successfully raise awareness of sexism in contemporary British society and more to focus moral and medical attention on young women; this has been to the great advantage of right-wing discourses, ‘in the attempt to control female sexuality’. 24 A parallel recognition has been made by Gill, who has recently criticised the public discourses on sexualization that her academic writings are seen, for example by Malson et al. (2011), to have spearheaded. Gill (2012) has expressed concern that: ... these terms threaten to reinstate the terms of the ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s, with their familiar polarizations and discomfiting alliances between procensorship feminists and right wing religious organizations... Might it not be more productive to talk about sexism rather than sexualization? Despite the way they appear to speak to something apparently ‘new’ and ‘real’, there are many problems with the notions of ‘sexualization’... The terms are too general; they are difficult to operationalize and therefore to use analytically. More than this, they tend to homogenize, ignoring differences and obscuring the fact that different people are ‘sexualized’ in different ways and with different meanings... they pull towards judgments about ‘explicitness’ and ‘exposure’ rather than questions about equality or justice. My genealogy suggests that, in order to move past the problems with the debate on ‘sexualization’, we need to stop depicting young women as either devoid of choice or exercising untrammelled choice, and as either innocent or responsible. It is this stark opposition between agency or oppression, produced by ‘sexualisation’ to the extent that it speaks of the contamination of innocence by sexuality, that has produced as a re-hash of the 1980s feminist ‘sex wars’, because the fundamental split between liberal and radical/socialist has been precisely along the axis of whether personal choice/consent is ethically meaningful. Yet we do not need to use the binary oppositions between agency and oppression, innocence and responsibility, to address the rise of new sexist cultural forms and narrowly sexual subject-positions in society today. We can treat female subjects rather as mobilising polyvalent cultural resources in the context of material and gendered inequalities. Moreover, we can recognise that these practices are, at the very same time, deeply embroiled in and disruptive of 25 particular elements of relations of gender power (see Renold 2008; Renold & Ringrose 2011; Vares et al. 2011 for examples of such research). 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