August 20, 2020 - 4:00pm
The public furore following the suspended sentence handed down to former MP Eric Joyce earlier this month highlighted once again the sexual exploitation of children and what we do with those who are convicted. But as Sarah Ditum pointed out this morning, Joyce is only one of 400 men arrested every month for viewing indecent images of children.
The problem is endemic. As a teacher and a parent, I believe the protection of children should be paramount. But we face an uphill battle in a culture that doesn’t just condone the sexualisation of children, it encourages it.
Netflix’s egregious marketing of the film Cuties is the latest example. “Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions”, they wrote. Seemingly oblivious to any red flags they published it alongside an image of pre-pubescent girls in erotic poses.
Whether it crossed the threshold to be considered a Category C indecent photograph of children is a matter for debate, but releasing sexually provocative images of young girls is shockingly irresponsible, and using them for commercial gain is reprehensible. The message to children is unforgivable.
Twerking is “sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting”, according to Merriam-Webster. Linking that to an 11-year-old’s exploration of femininity perhaps said more about the mentality of those who wrote the description and distributed it, but the pressure on pubescent girls to conform to the sexist and sexualised expectations of adults is immense.
Gone are the days from my childhood when children posed as children and not adults; those girls in the Netflix image were discovering what it means to be sex objects.
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SubscribeThey’ve not reverse ferreted at all. They’ve got the exact same content”little girls gyrating in bikinis”but they’ve cynically hijacked the left’s knee-jerk anti-conservatism by pretending that this is all a brave “rebellion against conservative values”. They hope to get away with it by tying it to the increasingly all-consuming culture war, and if we let them pretend to have “reversed” what they were doing, they will get away with it.
Well said. Why can’t people just let children be children? All this pressure to be adults – it’s no wonder so many adolescents have mental health issues.
Because the greed genome trumps everything and it kicks in for the sole purpose of making a buck. No matter that the bucks come at someone’s expense. So there you have it at it’s most basic Andrew. Plus my innate cynicism.
Education is also largely to blame for this: https://www.genderbread.org…
It seems so much of internet political culture consists of reactions against one’s putative opponents’ imagined positions. Thus, the left has decided that “conservative values” is, rather than being a very mixed bag, simply a list of bad things, so rebellion against them is always good. I’ve seen a lot of otherwise intelligent people adopt views that seem ridiculous, and this seems the most consistent and robust explanation.
Of course, another explanation is that fewer people have children. Everyone says that they looked at risk differently once they had children, and now fewer people do, and have fewer of them, that parental concern is also rarer.
Indeed, and for fairness’s sake we must point out that much of the right does the same to the left. It’s universal.
My own philosophical position, formed after many years of careful observation and intellectual consideration, is that everyone’s a bloody idiot.
(Yes, #metoo.)
Welcome to the club, all ‘truth’ are just placeholders.
We live is a society that tends to sexualise everything, so extending this further and further into the realm of childhood seems entirely to be expected. Furthermore, as a current article on Unherd by Mary Harrington observed, in modern feminist thinking, anything that females regard as empowering IS by definition feminist, and that includes the power of sexuality. If little girls can get interest, attention, and any spin-off benefits by twerking, I guess that counts as ‘more power to them’. Furthermore, in feminist theory, regulating female behaviour is anathema and invariably an expression of patriarchal misogyny, so this pretty-much limits the scope of action to demanding that men make themselves unaffected by scantily clad pubescent girls simulating being humped on stage. I imagine in due course our concern about such phenomena will recede as the trend of adults regressing further and further into a child-like state continues and eventually meets children moving in the other direction. On current trends, the entire population from birth to death will soon have a common mentality in the range of around 11 to 15 years old. Give it another decade or so.
Brilliant comment
Making children to do a twerking dance maybe is not meant to sexualise the children as well as to ‘de-sexualise’ (I don’t know the right word for this) the twerking dance. The lambada-dance for example became something infantile, a dance for little children, while it was originally meant to be highly sexual.
The children here are like a tool for the adults that rather want to be infantile than grown up sexual beings, so they encourage their own children to perform what they fear themselves the most, being an adult.
But more in general and also the most important thing to always remember: dancing is a highly sexual act, let’s not dance around that fact and children are also sexual beings, already in the womb, the only question is to what extent you want to let them express that. I consider dancing as a harmless and healthy activity, so let the children twerk if they want. No need to encourage them and no need to discourage them.
Could journalists, who presumably know better, please stop misusing the word “endemic”? The correct term is “epidemic” (or just “widespread”). “Endemic” denotes a problem that is contained in just one area, i.e. “The rabies outbreak is endemic to the South Counties” (meaning it has not crossed into other areas).
How different is the BBC, which is reportedly producing a series for 6-12 year olds to “help” them empathise with transgender people? I’m sure this is considered quite an OK weeze among the wokerati, even those with kids.
It shows the current state of our society
Our “elite” are full of psycopathic pedophiles
Pizza Gate! Epstien, Maxwell, 50+ celebrities and a long list of elite high profile people are why!
Pizza Gate is total nonsense, and thrown about by people who haven’t checked their facts properly
The Cultural Marxists “long march through the institutions” gathers pace.
“Gone are the days from my childhood when children posed as children and not adults”
My daughter used to experiment with her mother’s make-up when she was quite young. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. Perhaps a slight rethink is in order as to where the line is drawn.
“My daughter used to experiment with her mother’s make-up when she was quite young.”
That’s a normal part of imaginative child play – i.e. dressing up games – and invariably purports nothing except innocent fun flights of fancy. Producing and directing it, and fetishising it for an adult audience for commercial gain makes it into something entirely different.
Quite.
When Channel 4 started up, they aired a regular programme called Minipops in which young kids were dressed up in provocative clothing and makeup, and mimed/danced along with songs from the charts. Bizarrely, it didn’t seem to occur to anybody at the channel that the sexualised presentation of small children might be an issue. As I recall it, the programme was scrapped pretty quickly.
I think we probably agree.
If the USA properly taxed these huge conglomerates they wouldn’t be as out of control. Things seemingly unrelated effect the balance of the whole.
‘ … the pressure on pubescent girls to conform to the sexist and sexualised expectations of adults is immense.’ Why assume (again) that females have no agency? In the programme, a young girl rebels against her Muslim mother. Netflix’s justification for broadcasting the show is that it is a rebellion against the values of Conservative adults. The girls are not under pressure to meet adults’ expectations – quite the reverse. They are challenging adults to allow them to behave in what they see as an adult manner.
We have known since Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, etc etc etc etc etc ad nauseam that allowing exploitation of children (whether in movies or in real life) is but a small price to pay in The Great Leap Forward. Except in Batley, of course, where they must be protected from wrongthink.