It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. …Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
Oh, the horror.
Now, I’m actually with Lawrence Downes on one thing: The sexualization of middle-school-aged girls is indeed disturbing. But in blaming the middle school girls for engaging in “simulated intercourse” on the dance floor is missing the point. Downes writes:
There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.
Agreed that it’s a cramped version of girlhood which tells girls that their only option is to be sexually alluring. But boys don’t have such constricted horizons because “they wouldn’t stand for it” — it’s because they don’t have to stand for it, and they never have.
Girls are not offered The Pussycat Dolls as their only models of female behavior. But they also aren’t offered the kinds of fluid, more complex identities that boys are. They’re offered a range of conflicting choices, and told to be everything to everyone — the straight-A student for their parents, but not so smart that they upstage anyone; sexy enough to snag a boy, but not so sexy that they’ll be “slutz” (to borrow from Downes) and then boys won’t really like them and parents will disapprove; athletic enough to have a “good” body, but not so athletic that you’re a jock or, worse, a dyke; successful enough to get a job, but not a ball-buster like Hillary Clinton or the boss in The Devil Wears Prada; beautiful and attractive, while all the models of beauty are sexy, in a heteronormative, male-constructed way; sweet and innocent, when even the idea of “innocence” is tied up in sexuality and some dude’s opinions about what the status of your hymen should be. Sexy, but not sexual. Mature, but innocent. Wearing a push-up bra while talking about saving your virginity for marriage.
And Downes is worried about the fact that they’re dancing to Janet Jackson?
Girls play with sexuality. At 11, 12, 13, 14 they’re figuring out what it even means to be sexy, to be sexual, to be a grown-up. Too much of what they’re fed is plastic, sexist, male-dominated crap. But shaming them for not sorting through all of that in the exact way that a 40-year-old man would like them to seems… unfair.
For every girl shaking her butt to Britney Spears, there’s another girl her age being handed a Promise Ring or taken to a purity ball or told that “good girls don’t” or “he won’t marry you if you will.” None of it empowers girls to be who they are, or grow into who they want to be. For all the hemming and hawing over girls having their budding sexualities manipulated by advertisers and MTV, there’s silence when it comes to those same girls having their sexualities manipulated and controlled by men and male establishments. They’re two sides of the same coin. And at least the 13-year-olds dancing to Janet Jackson are having some fun — I did a 5th grade dance routine to a Salt n Pepa song (and a Janet Jackson song too, now that I think about it), and I think I came out ok. It was tongue-in-cheek. We didn’t even really care what the lyrics said, let alone personally identify with their sentiments. We were experimenting, the same way we were experimenting when we put on our mom’s lipstick and high heels and pranced around the living room. Between sixth grade and 12th grade, I bought myself a promise ring, wore a push-up bra, tried out for the cheerleading squad, went to Christian horse camp, got drunk at a school dance and did my fair share of “grinding,” cheered on girls who made out with each other at parties, wore too much make-up, lectured my friends on the evils of premartial sex, pierced my bellybutton, and dipped my toes into feminist thought. It’s a process. The person you are at 12 is not the person you are at 18, or 24, or 40, or 60. Figuring out how to negotiate all the sexist, misogynist, sexy, and sexual stuff that’s thrown at you is a necessary part of growing up — and especially, unfortunately, of growing up female.
Yes, it’s problematic that plasticized female sexuality is packaged and sold for profit to middle school girls. But it’s not as simple as “middle school girls gone wild” or “parents need to be more vigilant.” Nothing we do is going to please everyone. Chances are, we’ll look back at a lot of what we did and we’ll cringe. Hopefully, more often, we’ll smile and we’ll laugh. But we’ll be learning. And shaming us with accusations of being slutty or one-dimensional doesn’t accomplish much.