Rosa Brooks has an excellent op/ed in today’s LA Times about pedophilia, sex, capitalism and children. She manages to criticize the hypersexualization of girls without resorting to shaming the girls themselves — which is a sadly unique perspective, as conversations about sexualizing children tend to revolve around statements like, “Have you seen what girls are wearing today?” The traditional argument is that girls are dressing like “little hookers,” and the girls themselves are attacked. Brooks, on the other hand, goes after one part of the system that puts girls in this position:
In a culture in which the sexualization of childhood is big business — mainstream mega-corporations such as Disney earn billions by marketing sexy products to children too young to understand their significance — is it any wonder that pedophiles feel emboldened to claim that they shouldn’t be ostracized for wanting sex with children? On an Internet bulletin board, one self-avowed “girl lover” offered a critique of this week’s New York Times series on pedophilia: “They fail, of course, to mention the hypocrisy of Hollywood selling little girls to millions of people in a highly sexualized way.” I hate to say it, but the pedophiles have a point here.
There are plenty of good reasons to worry about children and sex. But if we want to get to the heart of the problem, we should obsess a little less about whether the neighbor down the block is a dangerous pedophile — and we should worry a whole lot more about good old-fashioned American capitalism, which is busy serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter.
Read the whole thing.
And before we jump on the, “What are their mothers thinking?” argument when it comes to dressing children, check out Meghan Daum’s column. The beauty pageant culture creeps me out, but placing all the blame on mom is far too simplistic.
THE PEDOPHILIC undertones and general cheesiness were at the least grotesque. In the context of a child’s murder, the equation was all too easy to work: A child beauty queen, we reasoned, is an abused child. When an abused child dies, the obvious culprit is the abuser. Ergo, blame the mother. Now there’s an American pastime that surely predates baseball. Pointing fingers at moms probably even went on during the Paleolithic era; if some young Neanderthal displayed poor motor skills in his cave drawings, you can bet mama Neanderthal took the heat for spending too much time gathering berries outside the home.
These days, thanks to celebrity scolds like Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura, not to mention the increasingly vocal breastfeeding lobby (did you hear? a high percentage of Harvard rejectees were given formula as infants), we now have an unofficial consensus that mothers are to blame for everything except maybe global terrorism — and, come to think of it, can’t we blame Osama bin Laden’s mom for that?
Blaming mothers is such a cliche by now that even as we give it credence, we tend to laugh it off. But the case of JonBenet remains an extraordinary example of our unwillingness to give mothers a break.
Word.