Age article: Girl Power Eroded

The following article was published in The Age today.

In the series Arrested Development, there is a parody of the Girls Gone Wild series of DVDs called Girls with Low Self-Esteem. In the original videos, which have been produced since 1997, American college girls are filmed flashing their breasts and kissing each other at parties or during drunken festivities on spring break.

The joke suggests that, despite all the postfeminist claims about girls exposing their bodies being ''empowering'', striving for approval from men through these kinds of performances is more likely to lower their confidence.

As another group of students concludes year 12, a series of Victorian nightclub events has begun to target graduating schoolgirls as prime candidates for raunchy display. A muck-up day event that was to be held at Universal on McCrae nightclub in Bendigo was set to include jelly wrestling matches between girls from two local schools, including a Catholic college, until media attention forced its cancellation.

The most recent nightclub event to attract controversy is the Pens Down event that was hosted at CBD nightclub Roxanne Parlour before the VCE exams began. Several girls posed for photographs in their school uniforms, with their dresses pulled open and bra-clad breasts, sometimes squished together provocatively for the camera, on display.

When these photos were uploaded to the event's Facebook page, several girls requested that the images be removed. Some were reportedly embarrassed about their sexy poses being circulated online, while others were worried because they were underage and should not have been drinking in a licensed premises.

Unbelievably, the event promoter became disgruntled with these requests by concerned girls and did not spare a thought for the potential repercussions in their personal lives or future careers. Christian Serrao responded to the girls' pleas by posting the following message on Facebook: ''I just love how these year 12s are happy to get their tits out for photos, then send threatening messages if they're not deleted off our Facebook page. Kill yourself.''

While Serrao maintains that the ''kill yourself'' line is simply an internet meme with no ill-intentioned sentiment behind it, his comments are especially ignorant in light of the suicide of 15-year-old Canadian Amanda Todd on 10 October. When Todd was an insecure 12-year-old, she flashed her breasts to a man in an internet chat room. The man captured a topless photograph of Todd and then threatened to circulate it to her friends if she did not perform a sexual show for him.

He did distribute the photo online and even went to the extreme of creating Facebook profiles displaying the topless shot as Todd enrolled in new schools to try to escape being continually shamed and bullied by her classmates. The malicious distribution of this image was integral to fuelling Todd's depression, anxiety and panic disorder and is thought to have contributed to her death.

Some people argue that girls should be free to express themselves sexually, yet it is important to remember the ramifications of topless images in the digital age, especially when girls have posed for them when they are underage. While boys and men may be eager to view such images of teenage girls and the girls may feel valued when they receive compliments in response, the photos can have detrimental consequences when distributed widely.

Twenty-six-year-old American Lindsey Boyd is suing the producers of Girls Gone Wild. She flashed her chest as a 14-year-old to two men with a camera with no knowledge that the footage would be used in the series. Her image was even used on the cover of one of its releases, College Girls Exposed, and her high school years were marred by embarrassment.

Vanessa Williams was crowned the first African-American Miss America in 1983, but was pressured to resign in 1984 when nude photos surfaced and were published in Penthouse. She had posed for the photographs as a 19-year-old photographer's assistant, but believed that the images were private and did not sign a release consenting to their use. Though Williams was awarded the title because she had a beautiful face and body, the naked images were still considered to tarnish her ability to represent the pageant.

As the Amanda Todd case shows, once an image is placed on the internet, it is infinitely reproducible.

While a jilted individual can also post sexual images of their ex-partner online without consent, there are penalties for doing so. Earlier this year, Sydney man Ravshan Usmanov was jailed for six months for posting six sexually explicit images of his ex-girlfriend to Facebook.

When photos are willingly taken in a public location like a nightclub, notions of consent and privacy may be confused. Venues that seek to capture the school-leaver market, however, should show responsibility.

Such responsibility means not only being lawful in their service of alcohol, but also in how they conduct and promote their events with respect to girls who are underage, or who have only just turned 18 and may be subject to peer pressure while under the influence of alcohol.

As girls are increasingly willing to participate in their own objectification, adults should not exploit them, especially when they are underage.

Girls, "Tramps" and "Hookers": Target and the Girls' Clothing Debate

Target leopard print girls' shorts

We hardly ever hear public fretting about what boys are wearing. No railing about whether a boy is dressing in clothing that is not "age appropriate" or that might entice paedophiles. Yet the subject of what girls are wearing, as the recent media attention given to Target's clothing line for girls attests, is one that many parents feel strongly about. The debate began when a school teacher and mother, Ana Amini, posted the following message on Target's Facebook page:

''Dear Target, Could you possibly make a range of clothing for girls 7-14 years that doesn't make them look like tramps … You have lost me as a customer when buying apparel for my daughter as I don't want her thinking shorts up her backside are the norm or fashionable.''

Amini's comments resonated with tens of thousands of parents who "liked" her post or added their own supportive responses. When the social media backlash became a news story, a chorus of parents agreed that many of the clothes on the racks in Target for girls aged from seven to fourteen resembled those of "hookers" and "prostitutes".

The outrage spawned many opinion pieces. Dannielle Miller rightly pointed out that we shouldn't be shaming girls by labelling them "trampy" regardless of what they might be wearing, while others emphasised that it is adults who place any sexualised connotations on clothing choices. The heroine of my undergraduate years, Helen Razer, and Clementine Ford both offered up stories of their own girlhoods in their calls for the virtual lynch mob to calm. Together the articles suggest that for some time girls have innocuously worn revealing clothing, like crop tops or lycra pants, and that girls don't perceive a sexual element to this: it's just like a game of dress-ups.  Razer writes that "kids just see cloth and it is we who see meaning" and Ford proposes that "Clothes can't make children's look 'sexy'. They're inanimate objects." 

I agree with Razer that very young children don't derive significant meaning from clothing—although by the time they hit primary school, you won't find many boys who want to wear skirts or pink in public— but in the age group that is relevant here, from around seven-years-old and upwards, there is a major awareness of the various meanings of clothing. To not see any meaning in clothing, kids would have to be raised apart from our society and culture, with no access to the internet, magazines, advertising, video clips, movies, television or books. 

Branding is just one of aspect of clothing that children understand. I recall desperately wanting a pair of Converse All Stars in grade five but being forced to suffer the indignity of wearing an imitation brand. The shoes were practically identical to the much-longed for Cons, but the logo on the side panel was tellingly different to me and every other kid in my grade. But at least the merciless teasing was reserved for the boy whose family was so poor that he had to wear beaten-up Dunlop Volleys (this was prior to their hipster, ironic reclamation). Even children under 10 know that particular brands are authentic and are "cool" in comparison with generic items or house brands from Big W.

In addition to knowing about how clothing helps to communicate their gender and cultural savvy, girls also understand that clothing plays a part in how attractive or pretty they are seen to be. Cordelia Fine has noted how much more often people compliment young girls on what they are wearing or their prettiness, whereas comments about appearance are rarely delivered to boys. Girls are taught to understand that how they look impacts upon how they are valued. We know that even primary school aged girls are concerned about their weight and understand that being overweight makes them unattractive according to the thin body ideal.

We ought to think about girls' awareness of the importance of being attractive in tandem with the fact that girls are reaching puberty at an increasingly younger age. Breast development—the onset of puberty— is now beginning at an average age of nine years and ten months, according to a Danish study in 2006. Girls absorb from the culture around them what an ideal woman looks like and, as they develop physically, it is unsurprising that they seek to emulate the fashion that is popular for young women, or seen as attractive to boys and men. Girls may have always loved to play with Mum's make-up in the mirror or stalk around in high heels, but the age at which girls actually start wearing these tools that are intended to accentuate feminine attributes seems to be lowering. Or at least mainstream stores like Target seem to offer more clothing that mimics women's fashions without modification for the pre-teen market. So why is it a problem if girls wear all kinds of women's clothing styles? And need this imply sexual readiness to anyone?

What the History of Girlhood Can Tell Us

Richard Westall, Queen Victoria as a Girl

Razer makes a nod to the history of childhood by noting that children were once dressed in the same clothing as adults. Medievalist Philippe Ariès influentially claimed that childhood itself was not "invented" until the modern period, as before this time they were seen, and treated, as miniature adults. (Although there is much debate on this subject, and Ariès' assertion that children were dressed like adults seems to rely on the evidence of family portraits, which is the equivalent of looking at wedding photographs and suggesting that all little boys wore suits in the 20th century.)

Yet, apart from this one comment, the history of how girls appearance has been regulated and how girls are supposed to transition to womanhood have been absent from the discussion. If we look at the policing of girls' dress across the past century and a half, we find that there has always been anxiety about girls being appropriately covered and restrained by their clothing. As I have blogged about previously, make-up was also seen as fraught in the 19th century, especially for young girls who still had their virtue to preserve. (Married women were less susceptible to the risk of damage to their moral character through the sexual associations of cosmetics).

Franz Winterhalter, Queen Victoria, 1842 

When you read girls' books from the nineteenth century, as I do, you'll notice many references to girls "putting their hair up". Young girls wore their hair loose, but when girls of the middle and upper classes reached an age at which they were considered mature enough to be available for marriage they generally wore their hair up in public. This transition carried a great deal of ideological baggage. It was somewhat "trampy" for a girl of marriageable age to continue to wear her long hair loose because of its sensual associations. Just as Islamic women often reserve the sight of their hair for their husbands in the home, so would the proper Victorian woman keep her hair "modest" in public. By putting her hair up, a girl was signalling that she was ready for marriage, but also that she was a good, virginal type. At the same time, a girl might also begin to wear longer skirts. So clearly the protocols for entering womanhood worked to cover more of girls' bodies and contain their sexual appeal, unlike the general movement of today's girls into wearing more revealing clothing and accentuating their sex appeal as teenagers.

These changes in what girls wore and how they styled their hair would usually happen in advance of their "coming out", where they were introduced to "society" and might be presented to suitable bachelors. This would happen at around the age of eighteen, and debutante balls, which were still popular at high schools in Australia until fairly recently, continued some of the old-fashioned traditions associated with a girl "coming out" or being presented to eligible men.

Most cultures have some form of ritual associated with coming of age that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. In Australia today, most of us don't practice any of the formal rituals that once helped to demarcate girlhood from womanhood and clearly identify the moment of transition. When we see thousands of parents reacting to "short shorts" for girls in Target, perhaps it also owes something to the haziness of where girlhood ends and womanhood begins, rather than solely being a paranoid reaction to perceived paedophilia or sexualisation. I would argue that clothes are more than just "inanimate objects" and that children do understand the meanings that our culture ascribes to them. The confusion among adults, however, about what girls should wear says much about our own uncertainty about girlhood and girls coming of age in a culture that is increasingly fixated on women's sexual attractiveness.

Facebook Breast Ban: When Does a Girls' Body Become "Indecent"?

While teen girl cleavage and bathroom-mirror-pouting has been a fixture on MySpace for years now, the more "mature" social networking site Facebook has recently ruffled a few maternal feathers by removing photographs from its site that violate its terms of service. The images in question are those which show breastfeeding in which part or all of the mother's nipple or areola are revealed. While breastfeeding photographs in general are not problematic according to Facebook, those which do not have a baby neatly latched on to the breast so as to conceal any potentially offending flesh will be removed.

A spokesperson for the site, Barry Schnitt, explained that some images were removed to keep the site "safe" and "secure", including for children: "Photos containing a fully exposed breast - as defined by showing the nipple or areola - do violate those terms on obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit material and may be removed...The photos we act upon are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain."

The decision has sparked a full-scale debate not only about whether breastfeeding images are appropriate on social networking sites, but also about whether revealing the breast while feeding a child in public is appropriate and whether it constitutes "exhibitionism" on the part of the mother. The comments on one blog portray the idea that mothers who feed in public should shroud their chest and feeding baby in a blanket or trudge out to the privacy of their car. (Let's not even think about those poor mothers who don't have a car to conceal their feeding. These ones should just stay home.)

Other commentors take up the idea that Facebook spokesperson Schnitt makes: the presence of pictures of mothers feeding online where part of their areola or nipple is showing could be viewed by children. I'm not sure why the unlikely event of children seeing photographs on Facebook of mothers feeding babies is so problematic. It only becomes this way when we carry over our adult sexualisation of breasts to children themselves, bringing our own understandings of pornography and a body-obsessed popular culture to what is an essential aspect of raising a child (unless medical reasons preclude it). Still others commented on those who may find breastfeeding sexually arousing gaining pleasure from some images. I once met a man who worked at a "rehabilitation" centre for sex offenders (he incidentally said child sex offenders were never actually rehabilitated). Part of his job was to go through the TV Guide and ensure all children's programmes, including Humphrey B. Bear and Hi-Five, were struck from it and unavailable to be viewed by them because the sight of any children could be arousing to them. We cannot more broadly remove every image of children or babies that someone, somewhere may find arousing.

What intrigued me about the discussion was when a few posters, who could not see the offense in the female breast performing its essential function, homed in on the offending nipples and areolas themselves: what about the nipples of men and girls? Male nipples we know have no apparent function in the same way as female nipples do for feeding, so perhaps we can exclude them from consideration. Nevertheless, the Facebook policy appears to dwell on nipple exposure rather than the actual swell and volume of the breast which is part of what differentiates the female's chest from the male's. That aside, it was interesting to consider that the nipples of girls can be spotted on beaches and pools across Australia almost up until the point of sexual maturation. If it is female nipples themselves that are the most sexualised object in a breastfeeding photo, why do young girls swim publicly with them visible?

Now I shouldn't be trying to find logic in these ideas, so these questions may be unanswerable, and I also could not believe the way in which many posters likened public breastfeeding to public acts of defecation, urination, vomiting and sexual intercourse. These hang-ups about the female body performing its designed purpose are so deeply ingrained that is no wonder that some people reach adulthood in ignorance of the fact that breasts exist to feed babies. Also no surprise that girls themselves are getting the message that sexualised MySpace breasts show their attractiveness but breastfeeding is an abject act that will ruin her desirability. One poster discussed the "blue veiny" lactating breast with horror. The silicone breast is more natural and appealing than the reality.