(Photo by Rania Matar, NY Times)Actually, her New York Times Sunday Magazine online blurb editor asks that question, if you want to get picky, but I wanted to call some attention to Peggy Orenstein's piece titled "Girls Play Sexy" in the most recent magazine because while I am generally a very, very big fan of Orenstein's research and writing, this particular piece bugged me for some reason, and I'm still trying to put my finger on it. (Maybe it's just the blurb. I hate these cause-effect simplifications.)
First of all, while she's right to point out the issue of inevitable moral panic that follows every instance of a young women or girl acting in a sexy way (that youtube video of little girls dancing to "Single Ladies" is her main example, but she also includes the Miley-Cyrus-public-lap-dance example, and I'm afraid that Miley is now more like a young woman, and a very wealthy, seemingly together one at that), I think we do still have reason to be troubled by this trend. It's counterproductive to just shrug off the moral outrage because that doesn't really get to the problem at hand, in my opinion, it lets the media off the hook. (In full disclosure, I'm working on a book about news media-generated gendered moral panics about adolescent girls in "public recreational space" over the past 100 years, so I do know where she's coming from with this.)
So I guess it is the causal suggestion that is bugging me more. I personally find it hard to believe that anyone could make any real causal connection between a little girl dressing up in a halter top and gyrating Beyonce-style and a tween sending a naked photo of herself to her boyfriend, and I'm bothered this question is even raised, but the psychology professor interviewed is not saying that. He says (in a paraphrased quote) that this display and promotion of SEXINESS has nothing to do with healthy sexuality. Right on. I can't imagine anybody would argue that it would. But where are they getting the ideas in the first place? From the mass media's prevalent representations of girls and young women -- from the dolls she talks about earlier to everything else -- that fits very specifically into a patriarchal understanding of what it means to be feminine, and even more specifically, a feminine sexual being. This means that girls and women are objects of desire, to be watched and admired and possessed, and it's nothing new, but in this era where you can post and share anything from YouTube via Twitter, Facebook, or yes, even antiquated ol' email with as many people as you like, these patriarchal understandings are easily shared on a massive level, instantaneously.
Now, I'd bet that everyone sending the link of the girls dancing to Orenstein was sending it because they assumed she would be an appalled feminist scholar (that's usually the case when my friends send me anything related to girls and the Internet), and I think they were mostly right, though I like that she treats the issue with thoughtfulness and relates that it's more complicated than we might think. However, you cannot guarantee that's going to be the audience's reading of the video (classic encoding and decoding here -- thanks, Stuart Hall). Just as the mantra, "Well, girls ARE mean" seems to have become a totally acceptable statement in our culture, I worry that "Well, girls ARE sexy" or "Girls want to be sexy" will become a totally acceptable statement as well before long. OK, maybe not acceptable, but accepted. Post-structuralist theorist Louis Althusser would characterize this as a classic example of interpellation. The girls have seen plenty of examples of sexiness being enacted throughout their experiences with media and their lived daily (primarily mediated) experiences with peers, society accepts that this happens, the mass and interactive media provide a never-ending feedback loop, and poof. Through interpellation, it's so. Before long, sexuality and sexiness are in fact, mistakenly conflated, as the article suggests they might be.
Furthermore, why do we have to lump all things related to femininity and the Internet together somehow, as if they are actually related? I'd be more inclined to argue against technopanic than gendered moral panic in that case. You see this tendency repeatedly in mass media reporting. Even if the story is about a young girl who met a sexual predator while using MySpace, the lede often will extrapolate, bringing in "social networking," or "the Internet" -- because it's all the same big evil thing. Of course, we should be talking about teenage girls and sexting with mobile devices in the same breath that we use to discuss how a young girl's parent or dance instructor uploaded a video of them dancing in a non-little-girl-ish way to YouTube that was subsequently spread all over the Internet.
Indeed, space constraints never allow reporters or columnists to tell the most complete, most complicated stories (at least as complete and complicated as we long-winded academics wnat to see), and I suppose that is why blogs like this one exist.
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