So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids
by Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne
(Ballantine Books)
I really wish that when I was in preschool, my parents had told me that it’s okay to masturbate.
Yeah, that’s right – I’ve been masturbating since preschool. (Not continuously, smart ass.) At age 4, I polished the knob. At age 9, I tickled the pink. At age 12, I buffed the muff. And you can be sure that I developed a deep sense of shame and disgust about it almost as soon as I learned to understand language. I had no idea what it was or that it was related in any way to reproduction; my first and only lesson about it was that a) it was wrong, and b) I was the only human being on the planet sick enough to do it.
Which isn’t to say that sex education was absent during my childhood. I knew from a very early age what the word “sexy” meant. She-Ra was sexy. Strawberry Shortcake was not sexy. When the grown women in my life put on makeup and heels, they became sexy, and they stopped being sexy when they changed into jeans and T-shirts. In fifth grade, the girls in my class started shaving their legs, and I became painfully aware of my own coarse carpet of hair. My mom and I fought about it for weeks. She was (rightly) appalled that an eleven-year-old was gunning to take a razor to her legs, but unfortunately, her flat refusal only made me more determined to do it. See, I needed to do it. In a Southern California April, wearing long pants wasn’t an option, so it was either shave or endure teasing about my hideous gorilla-legs. The fact that my mom didn’t seem to understand only served to turn her into an opponent instead of an ally – someone I learned to hide things from throughout my entire adolescence.
By now, at least some of this story probably sounds familiar to you.
Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne’s So Sexy So Soon seeks to address this very type of childhood experience: a complete lack of awareness about sex and reproduction coupled with a media-fed understanding of sexiness – that is, as one young girl in the book explains, getting boys to chase you and try to kiss you – that revolves around emulating TV characters and buying as many products as possible. It’s strange that our concept of attractiveness is contingent on spending money; indeed, as Levin and Kilbourne point out, sexiness and consumerism have fused together into one single phenomenon. You can’t be a consumer without being sexy, and you can’t be sexy without consuming. And kids are learning as early as preschool that it is imperative to be sexy at all times. It seems the authors had plenty of horror stories to choose from when compiling the book, which is brimming with tales of seven-year-old girls going on diets and fretting over how to get shirts that reveal their belly buttons, along with boys trying to make sense of “professional wrestling girl[s] with big boobies” and learning from TV that sex and violence are intimately connected. This atmosphere doesn’t only feed consumerism and hatred of one’s body; it also perpetuates rape culture. If girls are learning that boys are supposed to “chase you around,” and boys are learning that fist fights are how you solve problems, imagine how deeply these messages are imprinted by the time kids reach adolescence.
Now, as you may have already noticed, the title is a bit misleading. The book isn’t, as I initially thought, about borderline pedophilia – rather, it focuses largely on a phenomenon called “age compression,” in which children go through developmental stages earlier and earlier in life (like the seven-year-old feeling ashamed of her weight), and how the media both causes and exploits that phenomenon. Also, although the book is aimed at parents horrified at their kids’ fascination with Bratz dolls and Lingerie Barbie, most of the prescriptive elements in the book take the form of general media literacy training: how to encourage critical thinking, which types of toys to avoid, ideas for political action, etc. It’s extraordinarily useful advice, but it could have gone into any book on child rearing.
Furthermore, aside from a few mentions here and there of race and class issues, most of the book is heavily steeped in white, middle-class privilege. The advice they give on evaluating the TV shows your kids want to watch – recording them, watching them together, and talking about them afterward – is fantastic if you’re not working multiple jobs or night shifts. Urging you to develop a partnership with your kid’s school assumes that the teacher is going to take you seriously. And all the casual references to “dressing like hookers” aren’t doing sex workers any favors.
Finally, the writing itself is often downright annoying. The phrase “caring relationship” comes up at least a dozen times throughout the course of the book. Do the authors think we’ll forget when sex is supposed to occur unless they pound it into our heads? (Furthermore, why aren’t we challenging the assumption that sex outside of a committed relationship is inherently bad? The book’s section on hook-up culture doesn’t deviate a whole lot from the hand-wringing of Laura Sessions Stepp; their premise seems to be that having sex with someone other than The One, or at least One of The Ones, will destroy you emotionally. Yes, hook-up culture as it currently exists is pernicious, but why not create a healthy, honest sexual culture based on respect and bodily autonomy instead of continuing to yell “Not yet! Not yet! Not yet!” at teens? As someone who, shockingly, has had sex outside of a caring relationship, I can tell you that it can go just fine.) To top it off, throughout the final chapters of the book, the authors cap arguments with random quotes from various famous people – Raffi, Mahatma Gandhi, Howard Beale, William James, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Mead, and child psychologist Kate Rademacher – in a hackneyed effort to lend gravity to their writing.
So, with that laundry list of flaws out of the way, what does the book do well? I found that the sample conversations between parents and children were the most enlightening; where most parents might be tempted to simply refuse a request (for a diet, for a toy, for a definition of porn), Levin and Kilbourne demonstrate alternate routes that let the child come to answers organically and ultimately work with parents, not against them, to form understandings of sexuality and sexualization. These conversations can also help parents avoid blunders like one described near the beginning of the book, in which a boy says he wants to have sex with his classmate and is roundly punished before anyone thinks to ask him for his definition of sex. Turns out he thought it meant giving someone a kiss. Also, even though the sections on media literacy don’t have a whole lot to do with sexualization, if you want to learn about the media’s effect on children’s creativity and sense of self, So Sexy So Soon is a good place to start.
Just make sure you do it fast. With its multiple references to a rabidly conservative government that’s no longer in power, So Sexy So Soon may be quickly becoming obsolete. It’s useful, though, for parents who want to develop a basic understanding of how a child’s mind works, so that they can become allies and not enemies as their kids navigate the sexual climate around them.