The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Porn and the Lolita Effect

University of Iowa Journalism professor M. Gigi Durham’s new book The Lolita Effect addresses the ways in which sexually provocative media, toys, and clothing for kids and teens affect girls’ self esteem and sexual behavior. The eponymous effect is caused by a youth culture that sexualizes girls too young and in all the wrong ways, without appropriate sexual health information.

So where does porn come into all this?

Durham does not really address porn directly, but it comes up numerous times and is a frequent subtext. The culprit in her view is mainstream entertainment for kids and teens — the type that is not sexually explicit, but profoundly sexually provocative. In addressing the forces that build “The Lolita Effect,” Durham is basically talking about the increasingly sexual clothes, toys, and entertainments offered not just for teens but for children. Durham has worked with teen and pre-teen girls for some years; she has at her disposal numerous examples as to how rampant sexualization of teen and pre-teen girls can erode their self-esteem. But where Durham is different than many other commentators on this subject is that she believes just as profoundly that those cultural influences damage girls’ chance for a healthy sex life — “healthy” meaning “pleasurable.” She’s a self-proclaimed sex-positive feminist.

I can’t say Dr. Durham doesn’t struggle a bit against sounding sex-negative; she does, and at time she slips into what sounds like moral panic, occasionally while claiming she’s not advocating moral panic. But her heart is in the right place; she doesn’t demonize sex and she doesn’t demonize sluts. On the contrary: Dr. Durham believes that age-appropriate sexual information for girls will help them build egalitarian and pleasure-focused philosophies that embrace sexual diversity and informed sexual choices. That makes her very different from the family-first forces that want to see all adults desexualized “for the sake of the children.”

But I read the book with another agenda: In a world where Bratz dolls wear micro-minis and fishnets and companies try to market stripper poles to preteen girls (complete with fake money!), where does one fit in adult hootchie-positive behavior and its influence on global culture? Does the fact that teen singers dress like porn stars mean that porn is somehow the culprit?

Sure thing, exactly as much as Julia Roberts represents streetwalkers in Pretty Woman.

Durham also mentions “soft porn” briefly as an offender, and I think this illuminates an important point about The Lolita Effect, the book, and the Lolita Effect, the thing. By “soft porn,” Durham means the kind of non-hardcore entertainment that shows up on cable channels and direct-to-video offerings, where, in the absence of being able to depict anatomy, producers rely on weird stories right out of a B-movie that often, in my experience, have a strange anti-feminist subtext and are even more retrograde than hardcore porn when it comes to the depiction of both male and female beauty. The fact that soft porn is purveyed that way because it goes to the lowest-common-denominator speaks volumes; it happens to be that as long ago as the ’80s, I and my male friends formed most of our ideas about sex and women from “soft porn” — Playboy and cable-TV offerings. Bad porn is a hazard of the lowest common denominator — and I believe that the lowest common denominator has little to do with whether it’s softcore or hardcore.

In fact, decent porn is just another innocent victim of the same marketing machine that builds age-inappropriate influences into kids’ and teens’ entertainment. In the beauty, entertainment, clothing, toy and porn industries, the culprit is the same. cheesy, offensive kids’ entertainment is generated by the same sort of machine, relying on a sales-at-any-cost approach, that brings you crappy porn. “The fashionable jeans we buy may have been made by a preteen girl in a sweatshop,” she says, and while it’s a very different sweatshop, people creating kids’ entertainment are subject to the same capitalist forces that drive commerce-without-respect. It’s contempt for the consumer that leaves culture bankruput as surely as such contempt generates variable-rate mortgages and foreclosures.

As a marketing person I can tell you that this isn’t a Machiavellian patriarchal plot — or if it is, it’s not intentional. The people who put micro-minis on Bratz are not the same people who put phrases like “ball snot” or “baby chowder” on the cover of your porn DVD — these two industries are in no way directly related. But those people are performing the same task, and it’s a task that reduces the consumer to a resource to be exploited. I believe those marketing tasks are performed with desperation that increases the more money is involved. It’s profit-at-any cost that drives this machine.

I’ve heard many parents and Hollywood forces alike claim that they’re just giving kids what the kids demand. That is not unlike saying that kids eat refined sugar and no vegetables because kids want to eat refined sugar and no vegetables — while pumping high fructose corn syrup into your baby food and putting apple juice in a bottle. God forbid adults should decide what kids are allowed to do, right?

Or maybe adults should exercise responsibility over what ends up in the brains of children, rather than, say, advocating the legislation of so-called morality for adults as a way of protecting said children.

Meanwhile, in the hardcore arena, I’ve heard just as many porn marketers and producers claim that they’re just giving the public what it wants. That strikes me as almost exactly the same thing as giving your kid an IV of Welch’s grape juice and then claiming they never want to eat their vegetables. The same syndrome applies with writers of B-movie film scripts. “We do what sells,” I’ve been told countless times — but “what sells” is about what is created, and when businesspeople seek out the lowest possible denominator, they’re bitching out big-time. Bad porn sucks exactly as much as stupid crap that brainwashes teen girls into needing a Barbie body.

It’s a real danger that in seeking sex-positivity, we might become cheerleaders for all sex, even crappy sex. For what it’s worth, interested parents would do well to read The Lolita Effect with both an open mind and, if you’re like me, open contempt toward all industries. Business is bloody. If you want to save your soul, or your kid’s soul, you’ve got to get your hands dirty.

Thomas Roche blogs about lost cities, fairies, and Twittering in church at Thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 2 June 2009 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.