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Is Facebook turning girls into strumpets? That’s the thrust of the latest moral panic to come out of the Bailey review into “sexualisation”, an ugly word which suggests that girls are passive creatures with no sexual agency of their own. The word is relatively new but anxiety about young women in public spaces is age-old. Six decades ago, rock’n’roll concerts were apparently turning nice, young ladies into wayward, serial-shagging hussies. Now, it’s social networking.
As always, the discussion is focused almost exclusively on girls, boys being free to post pictures of themselves dancing to Lady Gaga in their underpants without incurring the opprobrium of the Daily Mail.
This state-sponsored panic about the sexualisation of childhood, by which nearly everyone means girlhood, has far more to do with religious censoriousness than it might at first appear. The Mothers’ Union, whose chief executive, Reg Bailey, produced the review for the government, is neither a union nor a mothers’ group. It is an “international Christian charity”, dedicated to bringing about “a world where God’s love is shown . . . by supporting marriage and family life”. The group pursues this goal “through prayer” as well as “policy work”.
If the male leader of an Islamic charity were to advise the government on how girls should dress and consume popular culture, there would be uproar. Instead, the Prime Minister congratulates Bailey in an obsequious letter for voicing “an issue that concerns so many parents”. It is reassuring to know that, in this decadent modern world, there are still powerful, middle-aged men on hand to manage and censor the sexuality of young women.
Parents have been concerned about their children becoming sexual for centuries. There isn’t a mother or father who will not, at some point, become frantic with worry at the notion that their son or daughter will one day grow up, move out and start being penetrated in club toilets by runny-nosed young men called Nigel whom they met on the internet.
Growing up, however, is the one thing that children are guaranteed to be getting up to every day. It is impossible to legislate against it.
There is nothing that the government can do to stop girls from growing up, unless it plans to issue parents with vials of puberty-suppressing hormones to slip into their children’s Frosties – and even that won’t stop them going on Facebook to flirt. David Cameron may as well endorse a report recommending that spring not turn into summer quite so soon.
Dangerous minds
Most of the teenage girls I know do not spend their Saturday afternoons vomiting their A-levels into drains with their knickers around their knees and catching chlamydia from Facebook. Most of them are fantastic human beings, who astonish me with their resilience and courage. Among them are my two teenage sisters, both of whom spend a lot of time on the internet. I am often distressed when they use their profiles in this den of cyber-iniquity to admit, for example, to enjoying the music of Coldplay, or to post photographs of themselves doing shots of sambuca, when whisky should be a fine enough drink for any Penny female.
I miss the days when we were all eating rusks together and listening to The Smurfs Go Pop! on the way to school, but I’m not worried about my sisters growing up too soon. I’m worried about them growing up into a world that doesn’t want them.
I’m worried that they will struggle, like millions of other young people around the world today, to find a job or a safe place to live. I’m worried that they will absorb religious rhetoric that tells them that their sexuality is dangerous and dirty, when the big, unspoken secret is that young women want sex just as much as young men do – and that’s OK.
The kids are all right. Yes, the internet is full of teenage girls posting pictures of themselves in tight wardrobe malfunctions but it is also full of teenage girls learning about modern philosophy on Wikipedia, applying for university, or posting video blogs from Tahrir Square.
Instead of worrying about young women growing up, we might do better to focus our efforts on creating a better world for them to grow up into.