Up until at least the 1960’s, we were still living under a tight, moralistic mindset largely engendered by Queen Victoria. And then came the sexual revolution. Mini skirts, free love, feminists at the forefront, full frontal nudity – the 60’s had it all. The British public became emancipated; sex was no longer a taboo subject. Ah, but...
Like everything else that has any intrinsic value and catches on, the sexual revolution was picked up by commercial interests and trained to walk obediently at the heel of capitalist economics. They’d realised, of course, that sex sells; and so they made it their own. Now I’m inclined to wonder whether we’ve really become emancipated at all. I don’t think we have; I think what we’ve done is replace one party’s emotional and social conditioning with another’s. Instead of having to hide sex in the deepest draw, we now have it flung at us from every quarter. Anybody not looking greedily for sex around every street corner has to have something wrong with them. Marketing strategists have it at the top of their list, and terms like ‘breast enhancement’ and ‘erectile dysfunction treatment’ have become commonplace. We’ve exchanged repression for obsession. What seemed like a good and wholesome process has become polluted, or at least hijacked. And sometimes it goes into areas that are a bit disturbing.
A leading fashion chain store in Britain got into a spot of bother this week. They were selling padded bikini tops for children as young as seven. Do seven-year-old girls want to appear to have breasts? How should I know, since I’ve never been a seven-year-old girl? You might wonder whether the marketing strategists thought so, but that isn’t really the point. The point about marketing strategy is that it doesn’t seek to fill demand, it seeks to create it. And so the cry went up ‘You’re sexualising our children!’ I agree, although for reasons that are probably different from those of the majority. Being a believer in the superiority of ethics over morality, I’m not a moralist; and so I don’t see things in moral terms. To me, it’s a question of what is appropriate.
Breasts clad in bikini tops have been tagged irrevocably as a sexual symbol for an awfully long time, and so the store chain can’t get away with claiming that little girls simply want to look ‘grown up.’ It doesn’t wash. It really is a case of sexualising seven-year-olds, and that’s inappropriate because seven-year-olds have no sexual dimension to their make up. That doesn’t start until puberty. But then we come to the nasty bit: it’s potentially dangerous. Isn’t the sight of little girls with ‘breasts’ likely to arouse the predatory instinct in adults so inclined? I would have thought so, and it conveniently brings the argument neatly full circle.
Could it be that the modern obsession with sex, so beloved of the advertising industry, is at least partly responsible for the upsurge in predatory behaviour that we hear so much about these days? I daresay the psychologists are still arguing about that one, but it strikes me as entirely possible. What price the sexual revolution then?
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4 comments:
Even more to the point, children are seen as commodities. As are human beings. The idea that people are things to be manipulated is the elephant in the room of unrestrained capitalism.
Absolutely. Unrestrained capitalism is about building money-making machines programmed to manipulate whatever it can find to serve its own interest. And it hides that machine behind a facade of real people in the hope that you won't notice just what is pulling the strings. And, unfortunately, most people don't, it seems..
A frightening reality. I vividly remember, as a young girl, seeing a girl, younger than I- she was a baton twirling member of the parades that took place in my town - and her face was made up as though she was a woman and she was dressed provocatively - even being so young I recall how bizarre and strange it seemed to me. And now, flash forward to today ... so many gross injustices - you and Susan hit the nail on the head.
That is just terrible! Little girls as young as seven- hell, as young as fifteen- shouldn't be dressed provocatively! It just isn't right, to any sane mind!
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