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The pursuit of youth - contemporary culture's validation/obsession with youth and its sexuality

  
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
16:57 / 29.03.04
From the paedophilia thread, I think this:

There's certainly 'circumstantial evidence' that a large element of our culture is sexually attracted to youth - the teenage models, pop stars, child beauty pageants and so on - so it should not be especially surprising that a proportion are attracted to even younger children. This does not mean it's "moral" or that they'll necessarily act upon it, or even that they're consciously aware of it - but pretending this sizeable subgroup doesn't exist gets us nowhere.

and this

Where the US has child beauty pageants, we have Page 3 girls in school uniforms licking lollipops. The *signifiers* of youth, and of youth well below the understood age of consent, are used in a variety of mainstream erotic publishers (see comment above on evolutionary psycholoists). These share newsagent shelves and often double-page spreads with news stories reporting the evil of paedophilia, and in extreme cases distributing little badges with the picture of victims of child sex abuse to be worn by those who claim the most violent antimony to the wrongdoers. It's sending some pretty confused signals - my personal favourite, of course, being the classic juxtaposition in the Daily Star of an article slamming Chris Morris' Brass Eye special next to an article about the budding breasts of 15-year old Charlotte Church.

bear further examination.

Our culture is sending us, as Haus notes, some pretty mixed messages on youth and sexuality. And to pretend that this isn't so is probably one of the least constructive responses possible.

So let's have a look at how our culture validates (signifiers of) youth/adolescence as sexy while being ever more concerned with the sexual danger that children are in from adults.
 
 
Grey Area
18:20 / 29.03.04
I recall a television ad from about a month ago for a magazine aimed at under-teen (13 and below would be my guess) girls. This ad made a big deal about the fact that each magazine would come with a free 'fashion accessory' and would help you make yourself look like a rock star/pop idol type person.

Now, every person in the room with me agreed that it was terrible that a magazine aimed at children would try and help them create the same overly-sexual look sported by many female music icons. However, when I asked the girls if any of them had never tried to dress up as their female music icon in the 80's, a lot of them replied in the affirmative. The main difference between then and now would be that they didn't have a magazine that told them how to do it, and (apart from fancy-dress parties) they didn't sport the look to the outside world.

Children have always tried to assume adult roles as a play-time activity. They role-play themselves in adult jobs and play dress-up with adult clothes (cue stereotype image of girl wearing mother's oversized high heels). Now, from a developmental psychology point of view this is all very healthy and normal. However, in the current social climate, there are people who would decry this formerly innocuous activity as children getting in touch with their sexuality too soon.

The point I am trying to make here is that what we are being shown as 'new' behaviour by children in terms of sexual behaviour is not new. What has happened is a shift in the generally held opinions of the activity and the assumed implications thereof. Also, you need to consider the aspect of the media and the growing influence it has on people's opinions. If the Sun, Daily Mail and whatnot had chosen to ignore the issue as whole, would we be having this discussion? Or would we still be holding fast to the viewpoint that it's all healthy fun and games when a girl (or a boy for that matter) wants to dress in a manner that emulates the more mature style of their older peers?
 
 
Char Aina
18:40 / 29.03.04
The point I am trying to make here is that what we are being shown as 'new' behaviour by children in terms of sexual behaviour is not new.

but isnt the point more that sclub8, the kiddy version of sclub7, are?
 
 
Grey Area
18:56 / 29.03.04
Are what? A new form of sexual behaviour by children? Or is it a new approach by media channels to decide to push a younger form of sexuality upon us?
 
 
Jub
07:16 / 31.03.04
younger form of sexuality? I don't see that at all. Sclub8 are a younger version of the sclub brand true. Annoyingly happy youngsters making annoyingly catchy tunes. I don't think they are filling any particular sexual images.

One instance of the whole youth and sexuality was the countdown clock to the Olsen twins being legal. That was er... novel. Obviously it was a bit of tongue in cheek humour, but it's appropriateness was dubious.
 
 
diz
13:10 / 31.03.04
One instance of the whole youth and sexuality was the countdown clock to the Olsen twins being legal. That was er... novel. Obviously it was a bit of tongue in cheek humour, but it's appropriateness was dubious.

oh, i'm on the whole Olsen twins boat, but i think that has less to do with sexual desire for the Olsen twins and more to do with a desire to see their squeaky-clean whitebread image tarnished. i'm so sick of all the press about how wonderful and well-adjusted and sweet and well-behaved they are, and i'm just waiting to see the news reports of Mary Kate dancing half naked on the bar at some club while Ashley rails coke in the bathroom. you know it's going to happen, and that's the most fun part anyway.

i think that's part of the sexualization of younger people - there's a definite fallen angel fetish vibe out there, and i think the culture as a whole has gotten cynical about the appearance of innocence and have really gotten fixated on seeing it erode. part of that, i think, is a voyeurism thing, the transgressive thrill and privilege of being able to violate someone else's privacy. part of it is that our infoheavy society needs a steady diet of new scandals to keep the gears turning and so we're conditioned to view the appearance of innocence as prelude to the airing of dirty laundry. i'd like to believe that part of it is that the public is inoculating itself against the American Dream of the perfect happy nuclear family and acknowledging on some level that people are real, and have flaws, and violently rejecting the images of perfect families and perfect people.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:46 / 31.03.04
let's have a look at how our culture validates (signifiers of) youth/adolescence as sexy while being ever more concerned with the sexual danger that children are in from adults.

To an extent you have to ask how our culture uses those images of schoolgirls and some of those other things to provide a kind of gateway to becoming an adult. Girls emulating their pop idols are often experimenting with images and learning how to act as adults would- almost parodying adults though I don't think child beauty pageants work in quite the same way.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
16:19 / 31.03.04
The mixed messages absurdity of it really comes home to roost with The Skool Disco Phenomenon (tm). So on the one hand we have sensational warnings in the tabloids about the number of evil nutters stalking our children and hanging out at playgrounds looking for prey, while on the other, if you are in any way culturally connected as a vibrant, club going consumer, you are encouraged to attend a nostalgia nightclub where all the young ladies are dressed as school-girls - and the obvious attraction of dressing like a really slutty schoolgirl can be witnessed in the queues...

There is no way of avoiding the fact that this is fetishising allegedly inappropriate desires, consenting adults or not...
 
 
ibis the being
19:31 / 31.03.04
The "slutty schoolgirl" is, I think, an odd illustration to include in this discussion. I'm a straight woman w/ no schoolgirl fantasies of my own so please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the schoolgirl fantasy meant to tap into the inner adolscent in the fantasizer himself? That is, it's not appealing to the old(er) man's sexual tastes quite as much as the (whatever-aged) man's inner adolescent. Isn't it?

Actually, could that be what's at the root of a lot of the "attraction to youth" in our culture? That people are no so much lecherously drooling over young boys and girls as much as they're attempting to become young boys and girls themselves all over again by somehow absorbing youth through desire?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:46 / 31.03.04
The mixed messages absurdity of it really comes home to roost with The Skool Disco Phenomenon (tm). So on the one hand we have sensational warnings in the tabloids about the number of evil nutters stalking our children and hanging out at playgrounds looking for prey, while on the other, if you are in any way culturally connected as a vibrant, club going consumer, you are encouraged to attend a nostalgia nightclub where all the young ladies are dressed as school-girls - and the obvious attraction of dressing like a really slutty schoolgirl can be witnessed in the queues..

But *thats* nothing new, is it? One can certainly trace the image of the older woman representing the naughty schoolgirl back to the St Trinians films, where the girls were given a look rather distinct from Thelwell's originals...

Skool Disco is a funny one. I suspect that there is an attempt to recapture the sense of sexuality and physicality being new and exciting, while at the same time no longer being confusing or terrifying. The odd thing about Skool Disco seems to be how *little* the costumes resemble actual school uniforms - it's drag queen rather than cross-dresser, if you see what I mean...

I notice that the fuzziness of the boundary is being stretched in all sorts of directions. We have genuine teenagers (or more precisely pubescents) being presented as objects of sexual desire (Charlotte Church, the Olsen twins), we have adults adopting signifiers of youth for titillating or sexual effect, possibly in a knowing and arguably parodic fashion (Skool Disco, erotic models posing in School uniform, St. Trinians(?) etc.), we have consenting adults attempting to look, behave or signify younger for sexual purposes (the Daddy/Boy relationship mentioned by Deva), all of which I thinK Anna might have a very salient poitn about - they are sort of rethreading the needle, either as the participant or the observer. Then we have children behaving in ways which might be viewed as sexual or titillating *if they were adults*, which is perhaps the hardest thing to sort out because it depends to a very great extent on perception: it seems unlikely that the parents of children paraded in beauty pageants in pancake makeup or sold in photosets over the Internet would admit, or believe, that they were sexualising their child, or that S Club Juniors were constructed as a cynical ploy to cash in on the paedophile market. The counterargument is generally that identifying these things as sexualising says more about the observer than the institution. Perhaps this is true.

So.... is there a unifying theory to ephebophilia, for want of a better term?

(To illustrate some of this confusion, incidentally, although at a different level: recently an artist had her exhibition at the Spitz gallery taken down, that exhibition being a series of photographs of her naked daughter, one taken each day over the course of some years. The Sun, which was in no small part responsible for the decommisioning of the exhibit, devoted an entire page to two images, one taken from the exhibition and one taken from a child porn site. No, really. This was to demonstrate that the difference between the exhibition and child porn was NIL (sic). Except that the difference was really terribly obvious. Beyond the fact that both the pictures were of a naked underage girl, the pictures could not have been much *more* different. One was an impromptu shot of a child, covered in food or dirt or something similar, eyes downcast. The other was brightly lit, and the child was *imitating the posture of a glamour model*, of the sort to be found a mere few pages earlier on in the newspaper.

This is all a bit wrong. Partly because it means either that my perception is hopelessly off, or that the editorial staff of the Sun, having decided on this little device, decided to brazen it out by claiming something that was manifestly untrue. Also because I have managed to live a long and happy life without once looking at child porn, until I found it IN A NATIONAL FUCKING NEWSPAPER, this national newspaper having presumaly sought out and possibly given money to a child porn site in order to procure it, to support their campaign against mages of naked childen being displayed publicly. This is very confusing, not to mention very confused.)
 
 
diz
23:06 / 31.03.04
The "slutty schoolgirl" is, I think, an odd illustration to include in this discussion. I'm a straight woman w/ no schoolgirl fantasies of my own so please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the schoolgirl fantasy meant to tap into the inner adolscent in the fantasizer himself? That is, it's not appealing to the old(er) man's sexual tastes quite as much as the (whatever-aged) man's inner adolescent. Isn't it?

no, not at all. schoolgirl-fetish porn is almost universally with overtly adult men if it's not other schoolgirls or solo, and virtually all written erotica fantasy scenarios play very heavily on the fact that the male involved is an older experienced man often an incestuous or otherwise "inappropriate" one like a teacher or a stepdad. it usually either swings to the side of the girl being uber-innocent and the man takes pleasure in seducing her ("oh, but Mr. Jones, Mommy told me never to put it there! *blush*") or uber-slutty and the man marvels at how sexually forward and experienced she is for her age ("she lured me into the faculty room and locked the door behind her... i couldn't believe that such a young girl had such a filthy mouth!"), but the man is most often older. it overlaps a lot with spanking, incest, and voyeurism fetishes, all of which play heavily on asymmetrical power dynamics in ways that jive with the age difference in one way or another. male-teen-on-female-teen porn and erotica is comparitively rare by comparison. most schoolgirl fetish play that i'm familiar with follows the same pattern pretty closely.
 
 
Ex
14:00 / 01.04.04
From the dizfactor's description -

But if you're reading that kind of commercially-produced slutty schoolgirl pornography, there's no guarantee whatsoever of how you're identifying. There's nothing to say that even if a legendarily dirty old man buys it, he's not secretly thrilling to the responses of the innocent schoolgirl because he is identifying with her, or performing some other complex blend of identification, voyeurism and other stuff. I feel like that complicates things.

I wouldn't want to push that argument too far - I've read a critic (Tania Modleski, IIRC in Old Wives' Tales) who says that Mills and Boon's relentless heteronormativity is wonderful because the female reader can always identify with the hero. Or identify 'getting a man' as s symbol of wider success (eg 'getting a promotion'). And I found that slightly willfully optimistic.
But I do think that the intersection of consumers (potentially dirty old men) with porn roles (more dirty old men) isn't as simple as a correlation. I, for example, am a cleanly young lass, but I teach - who am I supposed to identify with? Does gender always override other potential identifications?

I suppose I'm saying that although I see the relentless and annoying didactic bits of this scenario, I'm also (more) worried about other gendered power narratives, in other areas of life, which aren't explicitly sexualised.

You can boil me down to: Annoyingly repetitious, but more complex than it looks.
 
 
No star here laces
03:33 / 02.04.04
- Kids want to grow up quickly and pretend to be adults (not new)
- Young people are more physically attractive (not new, and biologically hardwired)

S Club 8 is not new: Michael Jackson? Little Donny Osmond? Shirley Temple?

I think all that's happening in modern culture wrt youth is the standard effect of mass media and increasing wealth applied to one particular field, in this case sexuality.

Paedophilia is not on the rise and there is nothing overtly pernicious about the fact that older people would like to jump younger peoples' bones.

But what certainly does happen is that when people have time and money to spend fulfilling their desires, and the means exist to deliver those desires to the people with the cash, lots of hitherto unseen stuff will come to light.

I think this is the case with paedophilia. As everyone should know, 90% of this is incestuous and probably unreported. I seriously doubt that has changed much over time. It's there in Greek myths and probably in lots of other really old stories.

The thing that is new, is child porn. Which is paedophilia commercialised and made tangible. Given how horrible paedophilia is, this presents society with a problem. We venerate choice and sexual freedom but we cannot condone this particular consumer choice. Hence the furore.

The presence of child porn sensitises us to the possibility of paedophilia everywhere. Which means stuff like St Trinians, School Disco and S Club 8 which is all frankly utterly innocuous suddenly gets cast in a suspicious light.

More interesting to me is the non-sexual fetishisation of youth. The infantilisation of the 20 something and 30 something age groups, if you will.

It's a marketing truism that the teenage years now last from the age of 10 through until the age of 35. People want to live the youth lifestyle for as long as possible - whether that means drugs, dressing down, travelling, video games or just general avoidance of responsibility.

Is this just because it's more fun that way, or is there some terrible societal malaise here that we oughta be wringing our hands over?
 
 
Cat Chant
07:09 / 02.04.04
Ex - you know what really interests me here? Predictably enough, the media portrayal of Daniel Radcliffe, especially since between the first and the second movie his presentation moved from "wide-eyed 11yo boy caught up in boarding-school adventure with magic - aww!" to "scruffy action hero with sword [aged 12]". There was something just really weird about the period just before Chamber of Secrets came out, when buses kept sailing past me with a six-foot-high image of this pretty, cheekboned 12yo face gazing levelly and austerely at me. Usually when I mentioned this to friends ("Why are they marketing Daniel Radcliffe like this? Am I supposed to fancy him? What's going on?"), they just looked at me as if I were mad and said "Yeah, you are meant to fancy him, but only until you're about fourteen." As if it were never possible to identify with a position that differered from your own in age. Which totally contradicts the basis on which the Potter movies are being produced and consumed, surely?

Actually, maybe that explains why all the characters in the books (who are now mostly sixteen, apart from Harry who is very young for his year and still fifteen) are so implausibly sexless: because adult readers are supposed to identify with them, but are not supposed to be encouraged to experience any sexual attraction to characters of that age? So if you're identifying with Hermione, she can't have a huge passion for Harry, in case the reader then gets in a tizzy by realizing that they're actually twenty years older than Hermione and thus identifying with her crush makes them a paedophile?

And I know exactly what you mean about the Modleski phenomenon, by the way. When I went to the ARPF conference this year and gave a paper on how shit the Harry Potter books are, there was this sort of fluttering, almost taboo-breaking reaction in some of the audience, like "Are we allowed to criticize popular books? Isn't that disempowering the reader? Surely everyone is reading these books as if they were good, and therefore none of the actual problems in them is allowable for discussion?"
 
 
Horatio Hellpop
13:24 / 02.04.04
i know when i was 12 i was attracted to girls my age, but of course as an adult i'm required to no longer respond to the qualities that attracted me at that age, which seems...a little arbitrary. how is it possible not to identify with the attractions of your younger self?
 
 
ajm
15:51 / 02.04.04
I became sexually aware very early, probably 6-7 or something. I started to notice girls and women and desired to have sexual contact at least by the age 9-10. Was I immoral in wanting to see/touch my friends mom? I came to understand early on that I shouldn't talk or express these desires. How should a young child like this express his sexuality? Now that I am an 'Adult' I honestly don't feel an different than when I was a kid, I only have more experience.

I think an important question is how should people repress/deny these feelings/urges, and is it even possible?
Does this social requirment to be with people of a similar age the same as the notion that people should be with other people of the same race - different sex? The idea of homosexuality once shared the same taboo as this age issue. Does it make sense to have a law the makes these sexual acts illegal at some arbitrary age? I've heard of 19 year olds going to jail for rape because they just turned 19 when there girlfriend was 17 or 18 an now it is an illegal act. This doesn't seem right to me. It seems completely relative to the situation, which in turn makes it a slippery slop.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:31 / 03.04.04
how should people repress/deny these feelings/urges, and is it even possible?

Okay. I think I'm just repeating myself all the time across these threads, but desire, power, and sex are not unitary things. 'Desire' is not a single phenomenon, the same in everyone who experiences it, which can only (a) be expressed in a defined set of physical acts ('sex') or (b) be 'repressed' or 'denied'. To assume that the sexual desires experienced by children are being 'repressed' or 'denied' if they are not finding expression in one of the narrowly-defined acts which our culture calls 'sex' is ludicrous and dangerous. Children can and do experience physical and/or sexual pleasure by eating, shitting, touching themselves, touching other people, touching soft toys, eating dirt. It takes a great deal of time, experience and experimentation before someone is ready to relate their range of physical and sexual desires to the culturally constructed notions of 'sex' in their community, and decide how those two sets of requirements are going to interact. So when you say:

I honestly don't feel any different than when I was a kid, I only have more experience

I'd say that was an absolutely crucial difference. How do you learn anything except through experience? Someone who has spent, say, twenty years learning about the codes and practices that culturally circumscribe 'sex' will experience sex differently from someone who is just beginning to isolate 'sexual' pleasures from other physical pleasures. And if that person were to have sex with a child, they would be bound to enforce their adult-constructed forms of sexuality onto the child's.

Which is not to say that in the future, when we are all free of taboos, it will be fine to fuck children. It is to say that there is no such thing as 'sex' pure and simple, and saying "Why shouldn't children be free to have sex with adults?" is a disingenuous pretence that one, highly coded, form of adult sexual expression ("sex") is the only way a child can express its sexual desire. This is nonsense. Children can and do express their sexuality in all manner of ways: children also express their creativity in all manner of ways, but no-one expects their children to conform to the standards of adult art practice and says that their creative urges are being "denied" or "repressed" if they're not welding the fucking Angel of the North at playschool.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:33 / 03.04.04
By the way, AJM, I hope you started to notice girls and women earlier than age 6-7, or you'd have been bumping into people constantly.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:43 / 03.04.04
Okay, just one more thing:

Was I immoral in wanting to see/touch my friends mom? I came to understand early on that I shouldn't talk or express these desires

If you're trying to say that this is a cruel curtailment of a child's freedom, I think you've chosen a bad example. It's a good thing that you came to understand that you shouldn't express those desires. That's part of learning how to get along socially in general: don't tell people (particularly, I have to say, your friends' mothers) you want to fuck them if you have no reason to believe they want to hear it. This is a rule that has stood me in very good stead in adult life, and the earlier you learn it, the better, I'd say.
 
 
Horatio Hellpop
17:54 / 03.04.04
but it's not so cut and dried as all that. (some) adults are attracted to (particular) children in the same way (if not the same percentage) that not everyone is attracted to me, even though i'm legally available, but some people are.
 
 
Horatio Hellpop
18:09 / 03.04.04
and i'm not sure that creating social norms based on discouraging the expression of desire is a good thing at all (as a general principle). i think it might be better to encourage respect for desire and its expression (well, that's a little vague); a child should respect (and the weight of authority should support this) an adults' desire not to have sex with them, just as an adult should respect the desire of the child not to have sex (sex meaning in this case, not the sensual pleasures of the world, of which there are many, meaning really...intercourse, i guess, or invasion of...it is a funny line really, parents bathe their children without it crossing the line of acceptability...up to a point, an age, a reaction in the child, but what is that point, how is it constructed? children in general i think, like to be touched before they dislike it, or become conscious (which implies an external cause, but it may also be by choice, by aesthetics even if the idea of aesthetics doesn't figure, by identification, by the struggles for power which describe much of childhood) of a dislike for being touched by certain specific people. my (original) point is basically just that i can picture a scenario where a child's expressing desire for an adult was just understood by the adult without it implying the necessity for realization. certainly the adult has the balance of power on his/her side and can refuse the advances of the child? does this happen a lot pre-pubescence, probably not, or you said this deva, the "advances" of the child are not the same as the "advances" of the adult because of the adults awareness of the social(ly constructed) implications of the actions. but should it be that way? i often feel like i should strive in my actions to attain a purity that comes not from discarding social conventions but from retaining a connection to desires (that i think) originate outside the societal context.
 
  
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