NURTURE
The Pornification
of Our Young
An over-sexualised
culture coupled with using
the female body (and
increasingly, the male
body) to sell products is
becoming an unhealthy
norm. We tackle how the
pornification of the human
body in the media is having
an unhealthy impact on
our children.
From Miley Cyrus seductively licking
a sledgehammer to a bevy of topless
models cavorting in pop star Robin
Thicke’s summer hit music video
Blurred Lines to Victoria’s Secret
new PINK brand that has a range of
underwear specifically targeted at
young teenagers with words such as
“Wild” and “Call Me” emblazoned
on the back, it is clear that today’s
marketers and influencers are pushing
the boundaries of sexuality to sell their
products and offerings.
The unwitting pawns in this game
of sexual one-upmanship are young
children; girls begin to believe that
their self-worth is measured by how
much they bare in public while boys
start forming a distorted view of
women and reality. Similar to the
effects of pornography on the
brain, studies have shown
that sexualisation or hypersexualisation interferes
with children’s and
adults’ ability to develop
a healthy sense of
sexuality “on [their]
terms and disrupts the possibility of
healthy intimacy”.
Melissa Wardy, author and mother
of two, believes there is so much
sexualisation in the media that the
public has become massively immune
to it. “Sexualisation has become
more gratuitous and accessible and
we regularly see the sexualisation
of young girls in the media without
public outcry. As one media content
creator pushes the envelope, the bar
slides. Then, everybody begins to get
away with more. Then comes the next
one who needs the shock factor, and
so on. I would not say society has
become more accepting of it. Rather,
we have become desensitised to it.”
Renowned presenter, speaker and
activist Cordelia Anderson fully
agrees with Melissa. She says:
“More sexually harmful images and
messages have become the new
normal. What was once considered
‘explicit’ is now tame and the hypersexualisation of children as well as
the pornification of images of all ages
is becoming increasingly mainstream,
if not already so.”
The proliferation of digital devices
such as smartphones and tablets in
today’s society have also contributed
to this epidemic.
Wardy indicates that this shift from
personal to digital communication
allows for “these sexualised images
to be omnipresent, whereas a
decade ago, they would have been
limited to magazines, television
or movies, billboards, and other
traditional advertising”. And as the
average age of digital device users
becomes younger and younger,
it means even more children are
growing up surrounded by this
sexual imagery and will begin to
think that these are normal.
And while both Wardy and
Anderson do agree that there are
differences in the Western and
Eastern media’s sexualisation of
people, the Internet has slowly but
surely blurred geographical lines,
according to Anderson.
Wardy points out that “Western
women are more often objectified
in a way that is more pornographic
and violent”, while Eastern countries
often objectify women to “uphold
homogenised European beauty
ideals (white skin, round eyes, etc.)”,
explaining the popularity of whitening
creams in Asia.
THE EFFECT OF THE MEDIA’S SEXUALISATION ON YOUNG BOYS AND GIRLS
Wardy: Young girls are deeply impacted by sexualisation in the me XK