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Please note this is a recreated post as I could not find it on the internet archive.

What do you say to that? As I stared at my 3.5-year-old my heart ached. Has it started already? "You're always beautiful, mija." On one hand I can't say that it's much different than when I was a kid. I was dumped for a cuter girl by my best friend, Katie, in kindergarten. I watched "Charlie's Angels" with my parents and wore short shorts. But there was a clear view that some things were for adults. My Strawberry Shortcake purse was full of Bonnie Bell flavored chapsticks not real make-up.

We can all see around us that the sexualization of our daughters is getting more bold and targeting pre-schoolers. The American Psychological Association took our observations and made sense of the insanity. In February the APA released the "Report of the APA Taskforce on the Sexualization of Girls." It is only 40 pages long, but more frightening than any Stephen King novel.

What the report does is give a snap shot of current research and the psychological theories that are sued to explain the effects that media & products have on girls. It also covers what consequences result from the sexualization of girls which range from depression and eating disorders to avoiding science-related careers (another reason this topic hits home). It is not a research report but a call for research and action. Areas addressed include:

• TV
• "..in her analysis of prime-time programs popular among children and adolescents, L.M. Ward (1995) found that 11.5% of the verbal sexual messages coded involved sexually objectifying comments, nearly all of which were about women." - Page 6
  
• Music videos
• "In contrast to public perception, these patterns are not restricted to pop or hip hop videos. In one analysis of country music videos, 42% of female artists were coded as wearing alluring clothing (Andssager & Roe, 1999)." - Page 7
  
• Music lyrics
• "One comprehensive analysis of sexual content in adolescents’ “media diets” demonstrated that sexual content appeared more frequently in adolescents’ musical choices than in their television, movie, or magazine choices (Pardun,L’Engle, & Brown, 2005);" - Page 7
  
• Movies
• "Another notable trend is the near absence of female characters in the top-grossing motion pictures (Bazzini, McIntosh, Smith, Cook, & Harris, 1997) and in G-rated movies (Kelly & Smith, 2006). Kelly and Smith evaluated the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2004. Of the over 4,000 characters in these films, 75% overall were male, 83% of characters in crowds were male, 83% of narrators were male, and 72% of speaking characters were male." - Page 8
  
• Cartoons & Animation
• "Studies do show that, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Dora the Explorer), cartoons primarily portray girls as domestic, interested in boys, and concerned with their appearance (Thompson & Zerbinos, 1997), suggesting an overemphasis on the self as a romantic object, if not necessarily a sexual one." - Page 8
  
• Magazines
• "Nearly everything girls and women are encouraged to do in the line of self-improvement is geared toward gaining the attention of men. Even articles on physical fitness analyzed in Seventeen and the now defunct YM (Durham, 1998) centered on the need for girls to increase their sexual desirability through exercise rather than on improving their health or well-being." - Page 8-9
  
• Sports Media
• "Shugart’s (2003) study on print and television coverage of the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team lends further support for a pattern of sexualizing female athletes. Shugart argued that media coverage of the team was sexualized in three ways:1)  Subtle sexualization occurred through passive objectification—for example, photographs that favored an athlete’s face rather than her athletic performance. 2) Less subtle sexualization was shown in commentators’ remarks—for example, when Brandi Chastain removed her jersey after scoring the winning goal of the World Cup. Although this specific behavior was identical to that of male soccer players in the same circumstances, in Chastain’s case, sportscasters called it a “striptease” and deemed her “the owner of the most talked-about breasts in the country” (pp. 12-13). In several media sources, the team was referred to as “booters with hooters” (p. 13). 3) “Vigilant heterosexuality” was evident in commentary that placed the femininity of female athletes and their family lives in the foreground to suggest that they were not lesbians (regardless of their real-life sexual orientation)." - Page 10
  
• Video/computer games
• "In a recent study, Haninger and Thompson (2004) sampled 80 “Teen”-rated3 video games from a population of 396 games in release in 2001.They observed sexual themes in 27% of games." - Page 10
  
• Internet
• "Lambiase (2003) examined the sexualization of girls and women on one specific type of Web site that targets and attracts girls
  and teens: official and fan Web sites of male and female celebrities. She found that female celebrities were far more
  likely than male celebrities to be represented by sexualized images, regardless of whether the site was official or produced
  by fans. She also found that female musicians were more likely to be sexualized than other female celebrities." - Page 11
  
• Advertising
• "Recent evidence, however, indicates that drawing attention does not always translate into selling products. In an experimental investigation involving 366 adults 18–54 years of age, Bushman (2005) demonstrated that participants exposed to programming
  featuring sexual commercials were less likely to remember the advertised brands and expressed less interest in buying those brands than participants who had seen ads with no sexual content." - Page 12
  
• Dolls
• "Recently, Hasbro was poised to release a series of dolls modeled after the musical group The Pussycat Dolls (a former burlesque troup known for their revealing clothing and highly sexualized lyrics), designed for 4- to 8-year-old girls. A grassroots protest
  campaign convinced them to pull this line of dolls (Goldiner, 2006)." - Page 14
  
• Clothing
• "Retail stores such as Limited Too that focus on the so-called tween population (defined by the store as ages 7 up to teen years) sell sexy lingerie such as camisoles and lacy panties, items that once would have been marketed solely to adults (Lamb & Brown, 2006)." - Page 15
  
• Cosmetics
• "Although there is nothing wrong with girls wanting to smell nice and look attractive, advertisements for adult women’s perfume overwhelmingly advertise seduction and sex appeal through the use of scent. Cosmetics and perfume are often associated specifically with the desire to be sexually attractive, a desire that seems misplaced in prepubescent girls."- Page 15
  
  

The excerpts above are a small taste of the full report. As someone who feels that they have a good handle on media issues especially since I sit on the board of Women in Media & News, a media reform organization, I often had to stop reading the report because I was flabbergasted. I urge everyone to read this report. It is eye opening and has really made me rethink the way that I allow media to penetrate my daughter's life. I'm not saying that the TV and computer are getting tossed, because I know that won't solve the problem. One suggestion for battling this onslaught is to watch TV together and comment on gender stereotypes. I know I can do this because I already do this in my head. I just need to start opening my mouth more often.

Moderation is the key to life. Dress-up is fine. Dressing up like a stripper is not. Playing house is fine, but not in a french maid's outfit. The Maxim-ifcation of young Hollywood stars isn't helping the problem either. This is what I call my observation that nowadays actresses don't have to do Playboy to "become" adult actors, they just wear a skimpy outfit on the cover of a men's magazine (Jessica Biel & Alyson Hannigan (you broke my heart, Willow!) just to name two.). When I was a kid (gawd, how old do I sound now?) sure you wanted to look cool/nice, but the fact that girls only a few years older than my daughter are entering rehab for eating disorders is a 5-alarm fire that must be addressed. Something is wrong when looking good is the only aspect of one's life that gets any attention. "Playing dumb" to get a guy has gotten out of control (I gotta admit, I never did this and could never imagine why anyone would.).

The sexualization of our daughters is harming to all of us.

In Part Two I'll tackle one critique of this report - that apparent lack of boys & fathers. If you read the report, you'll already know what I'm going to say. But stay tuned either way.

In Part Three let's talk about what we can do to counter this attempt to take our daughters' childhood from them. What are we letting into our homes that may be detrimental and is there an antidote to it all? We all know we can't lock them in their rooms until they are 30, as tempting as this may be.

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