Idolising Children?

In today’s Age Larissa Dubeki writes a suitably outraged opinion piece on hair removal products and brazillians beng marketed to the tween market - “Why 10 is too young for your first Brazillian”. The issue is endemic. In researching our next book, my wife Tania has established that the broad range of tween magazines are selling sex and adult concepts of sex to children as young as six.

The debate on this issue is really reaching a climax, but beyond bans on products, advertising and greater regulation of advertising (all which are needed). There is little discussion about why children are being marketed to in this way, how we let it get to this point, why we let it continue and what else can be done about it.

I don’t have a suite of answers to those questions - except to ask them, and then ask us to look at our culture more broadly.

I’d contend that the reason childhood is more sexualised is that our culture is becoming more sexualised. Of course that is a very simple way of defining it, but children live in the same society we do. The idea we can stop them from being exposed to the world in which they live is somewhat naieve.

Can we have a culture where the objectification of women can still be so rife and the demands placed on very specific and often demeaning forms of beauty and sexuality that we can completely shield our children from? I doubt it. The values of a society seep through to the new generations.

So, at some point in the debates about the sexualisation of childhood we have to start having a discussion about the sexualisation of adulthood.