Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 196 views

    Lolita

    Uploaded by

    aryan
    Durham argues that media increasingly sexualizes young girls through examples like sexualized clothing for children. She notes this "Lolita Effect" draws on the sexualization of young actresses like Shirley Temple and normalizes the idea of the sexy child. However, her goal is not to blame but to empower girls and have open discussions to help youth develop healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality. She recommends teaching girls they don't need to conform to beauty standards and helping them understand degradation and violence are not normal parts of relationships.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Lolita

    Uploaded by

    aryan
    196 views2 pages
    Durham argues that media increasingly sexualizes young girls through examples like sexualized clothing for children. She notes this "Lolita Effect" draws on the sexualization of young actresses like Shirley Temple and normalizes the idea of the sexy child. However, her goal is not to blame but to empower girls and have open discussions to help youth develop healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality. She recommends teaching girls they don't need to conform to beauty standards and helping them understand degradation and violence are not normal parts of relationships.

    Original Description:

    Original Title

    lolita.docx

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Durham argues that media increasingly sexualizes young girls through examples like sexualized clothing for children. She notes this "Lolita Effect" draws on the sexualization of young actresses like Shirley Temple and normalizes the idea of the sexy child. However, her goal is not to blame but to empower girls and have open discussions to help youth develop healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality. She recommends teaching girls they don't need to conform to beauty standards and helping them understand degradation and violence are not normal parts of relationships.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    196 views2 pages

    Lolita

    Uploaded by

    aryan
    Durham argues that media increasingly sexualizes young girls through examples like sexualized clothing for children. She notes this "Lolita Effect" draws on the sexualization of young actresses like Shirley Temple and normalizes the idea of the sexy child. However, her goal is not to blame but to empower girls and have open discussions to help youth develop healthy attitudes towards sex and sexuality. She recommends teaching girls they don't need to conform to beauty standards and helping them understand degradation and violence are not normal parts of relationships.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    What are little girls made of?

    LOLITA EFFECT BY M. GIGI DURHAM

    'Oh no', was my first reaction when I was asked to read The Lolita Effect by M. Gigi Durham
    PhD.

    Subtitled The Media Sexualisation Of Young Girls And What We Can Do About It, I assumed it
    would be another densely written, American, academic tome, blaming feminism for the
    breakdown of moral order and urging us to lock up our daughters to preserve them from peril.

    Thus, I was pleasantly surprised to find an author who writes like a normal human being, with
    very little tendency to the worst excesses of the jargon of academia. She's a professor of mass
    communication and media, and it shows in the lightness of touch she displays in her style.

    Durham begins by declaring herself a 'pro-sex feminist' who's only too aware of the history of
    the celebration of male and denigration of female sexual desire. Her aim is to free girls from the
    pressures of a media that sells them a distorted view of their own desires and desirability.

    She rightly picks on the usual suspects: Britney Spears as an underage girl in a fetish school
    uniform, and songs that go 'Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?'; supermarkets that
    sell pole-dancing sets as toys for little girls; manufacturers that make girls' pants with the logo
    'Who needs a credit card?'.

    There's example after example of music, film, advertising, manufacturing and retail industries
    that have long played with the Lolita Effect and have turned our girls into 'jail bait', 'prosti-tots'
    or 'kinder-whores'.

    Durham reminds us that Lolita in the original novel by Nabokov was not a consciously sexually
    voracious child, but an ordinarily attractive 12-year-old girl, fascinated as all children are by the
    mysteries of sex, who was used and abused by the novel's middle-aged protagonist Humbert
    Humbert.

    She likens this theme to the money-spinning and abusive marketing of anything from 'Little Miss
    Naughty' underwear, 'Wink, Wink' or 'Eye Candy' T-shirts through to Paris Hilton, the Pussycat
    Dolls and even the Spice Girls - and which, to my surprise, she points out, goes back a very long
    way.

    'The idea of the sexy little girl is a potent one in the adult imagination . our sex goddesses have
    often been very young and it's striking that the role of child prostitute was the springboard for the
    careers of many of them.

    'In Polly Tix In Washington, a four-year-old Shirley Temple played a pint-sized prostitute.
    Sashaying around in lacy lingerie and ropes of pearls, she announced: "Boss Flint- Eye sent me
    over to entertain you, but I'm expensive!" '
    Durham includes in her list the 14-year-old Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, 12-year-old Brooke
    Shields in Pretty Baby and 13-year-old Penelope Cruz in the French soap opera Serie Rose. More
    than a mere passing trend, then.

    And so we come to the 'What we can do about it' bit.

    Durham has two daughters of her own and is only too aware of the pressures on girls to conform
    to what their peers are doing, and of their resistance to lectures from parents on the morality of
    wearing fishnet stockings, 5in heels and an extended belt in place of a skirt. Sensibly, she
    challenges the 'bizarre idea that it's immoral to talk about sex'..

    Sex, as Durham convincingly describes, is part of their lives, and it's our job as adults to work
    out how to help them negotiate this 'complicated and often treacherous terrain'.

    She recommends that first we explain that emancipation is the opposite of the Lolita Effect. She
    challenges the idea that girls have to wait to be chosen by a boy, and that boys choose only the
    sexy siren. She asks us to help girls value themselves whether they conform to conventional
    standards of beauty or not, and to demolish the idea that degradation and violence are part of
    normal sexual experience.

    And she wants boys included in her strategies for getting young people to talk about these issues,
    and to analyse what they read and see in the media, even at a very young age.

    The book is a call for the complex questions of power and gender to be included as a part of what
    we now call sex education, and for us to offer girls the chance to achieve real empowerment and
    emancipation for themselves. It's a tall order, but it's a start.

    I would recommend the book to parents and teachers who want to help the youngsters in their
    care grow up with a healthy and confident attitude to sex, and the critical faculties to make their
    own wise choices.

    Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1178081/What-little-girls--


    SOCIETY-THE-LOLITA-EFFECT-BY-M-GIGI-DURHAM.html#ixzz4Fmg3skeZ

    You might also like