The models gracing the pages of a recent issue of Vogue Bambini, an Italian magazine sold in Australia, couldn't have been more than nine or 10 years old. But in their revealing bikinis and cherry lip gloss they seemed anything but childlike or 'cherubic', as columnist and blogger Mia Freedman writes.
'[The] pre-pubescent girls in this ad ... are portrayed as music video skanks,' the mother of three writes scathingly at mamamia.com.au.
Freedman quickly explained why her blood boiled so quickly at the sight of the ad. She was in the midst of reading Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist. It is a sombre new look at 'how we are eroding what was once the sacred space of childhood with a bombardment of appalling imagery and sexually suggestive ideas'.
The effects of such advertising on girls is well documented. In addition to Tankard Reist's book, recent books on the subject include The Lolita Effect by M. Gigi Durham, So Sexy So Soon by Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne and What's Happening to Our Girls? Too Much, Too Soon — How Our Kids are Overstimulated, Oversold and Oversexed by Australian researcher Maggie Hamilton.
Hamilton's exhaustive research found that girls as young as nine are worrying whether or not they look sexy or considering having their first Brazilian wax, that at the age of 13 girls were 'sexting' X-rated images of themselves and, by 14, many had already had a staggering number of sexual partners.
As a mother of a toddler son you'd think I'd be breathing a sigh of relief. That by sheer virtue of giving birth to a boy our little family has escaped the advertisers' predatory influences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although such ads are aimed squarely at girls of all ages (not to mention their cashed-up parents), the advertising net is designed to catch all the pretty children.
'Thong panties, padded bras ... T-shirts that boast 'Chick Magnet' for toddler boys,' write Levin and Kilbourne. 'Hot young female pop stars wearing provocative clothing and dancing suggestively while singing songs with sexual lyrics ... These stars are held up for our young daughters to emulate — and for our sons to see as objects of desire.'
Thankfully, my two-and-a-half-year-old son is yet to fall under the spell of MTV and Rage, but in wanting to steer