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Carol Midgely looks at The Lolita Effect, by M. Gigi Durham, in The Times: "Last Halloween, Gigi Durham opened her front door to find a five-year-old girl standing on the doorstep. The child was wearing a boob tube, gauze miniskirt, platform heels and glitter eye-shadow. “I’m a Bratz!” she declared. Durham was put more in mind of a child prostitute that she had once seen in Cambodia. There wasn’t that much to choose between the two girls’ outfits.
So begins Durham’s new
book,
The Lolita Effect, a critique of the modern obsession with prematurely sexualising young girls and a manifesto on how to renounce it. We have all seen this “effect” — the push-up bras for pre-teens, the satin thongs and “Eye Candy” T-shirts, the pink plastic “Peekaboo Pole Dancing” kit that was sold at Tesco, the magazines that tutor girls who have barely started their periods how to pander to an imaginary “he”. Who would disagree that the “baby-faced nymphet” — perhaps embodied most explicitly by a school-uniformed Britney Spears in the Baby One More Time video — is a regular fixture on the media landscape? What we might disagree on though is how to counteract it. Some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way.
Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires. Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.
What we should also do, says Durham, is empower them to see how skewed marketing messages manipulate females to reach for impossible standards of beauty — the Barbie body — as the one and only way to be “hot”. The reason this is peddled globally as the ideal female model is because it is profitable. A billion-pound industry of cosmetics, diet aids, fashion and plastic surgery depends upon it. It is this that makes millions of girls develop, very early in their lives, a false “self”.
“The Lolita effect begins with the premise that children are sexual beings,” says Durham. “As they mature they deserve to be furnished with factual, developmentally appropriate and useful information about sex and sexuality.” She describes herself as a “pro-sex feminist”. “I think sex is a normal and healthy part of life, even of children’s lives. I want my two young daughters — indeed all girls — to grow up unafraid of and knowledgeable about their bodies, confident about finding and expressing sexual pleasure.” This is not to encourage under-age sex — though she believes that non-coercive sex between teenagers is not automatically harmful and that we shouldn’t always treat it as though it’s the end of the world — but to encourage more public discourse on it. “I think that a lot of girls under 16 have sexual feelings. My belief is that the longer they wait the better they’ll deal with it because the older you are, the more capable you are of thinking through the consequences, where you stand and what you want. But we shouldn’t though be so terrified of the idea that kids are thinking about it because it really is a very normal part of adolescence.”
We cannot, however, just blame the media for this state of affairs. None of this would happen if people didn’t buy into it. True, says Durham. In fact, studies have shown that parents, teachers and other adults may unconsciously perpetuate the Lolita effect.
Do you? Do you instinctively favour prettier children who meet the Lolita criteria, while reacting negatively to plainer girls with larger bodies? Do you compliment female children on their looks, clothes and hairstyles, sometimes forgetting their achievements in a way you never would to boys?
“I see this a lot . . . when I watch people interacting with children,” Durham says. "People are very quick to praise girls especially for their looks, ‘Oh, how pretty you are/ great dress/ I love your hair today’, those kinds of things. And girls don’t get complimented on their achievements [in the same way that boys do] or at least it’s much more infrequent.” It’s easily done — we all want our daughters to look lovely, not least, if we’re honest, because a compliment to them is a vicarious one for us. Durham says that we can combat such effects by focusing much more on their achievements — on what they do creatively, in sport, for the environment, for charity — rather than how they appear. Magazine covers, she says, hardly ever feature images of young female writers or athletes, but of models and actresses, fortifying the message that looks are everything. We can help to make girls media-literate, teach them the lies of the airbrush, engage little girls in discussion about why it’s awfully dated that Disney princesses always need a man to rescue them, send e-mails and letters to companies that use images that we find unacceptable and tutor girls in how to challenge the mythical male gaze which is so often ill-informed about what boys really “want” anyway.
What Durham advocates in her book, which she describes as a feminist manifesto, is to find a way to think about sex separately from money and with young girls perpetually cast in the man-pleasing role. “Can we move to a place where we can consider sexuality as a human impulse that’s about ethical relationships between people and not just something that generates profit?”
In other words let’s not focus not on the imaginary He but the actual Her."
An excerpt from M.Gigi Durham's The Lolita Effect ran today in The Guardian (UK): "Lost Youth: Turning Young Girls in to Sex Symbols."
New in paperback, The Lolita Effect is a groundbreaking account of how the media sexualizes young girls. University of Iowa professor and journalist M. Gigi Durham presents new insight into media myths and spectacles of sexuality. Using examples from popular TV shows, fashion and beauty magazines, movies, and Web sites, Durham shows for the first time all the ways in which sexuality is rigidly and restrictively defined in media often in ways detrimental to girls healthy development. The Lolita Effect offers parents, teachers, counselors, and other concerned adults effective and progressive strategies for resisting the violations and repressions that render girls sexually subordinate. Durham provides us with the tools to navigate this media world effectively without censorship or moralizing, and then to help our girls to do so in strong and empowering ways.
By: John Mark Boling,
on 6/24/2009
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Professor M. Gigi Durham's acclaimed study of the media sexualization of young girls will be available in a new paperback edition next week. The Lolita Effect includes a fascinating new introduction from the author in which he discusses the Miley Cyrus/Vanity Fair fiasco that occurred just as The Lolita Effect rolled off the presses and into bookstores.
M.Gigi Durham will discuss
The Lolita Effect at the
Capitola Book Cafe in Capitola, California on
Thursday, July 30, at 7:30pm.
Professor M. Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect, contributes a provocative essay on sex and pornography on college campuses in the current issue of The Chronicle Review.
"Last year," writes Durham, "the American Psychological Association convened a task force on the sexualization of young girls; the ensuing report documented the lasting harm done to girls by a culture in which they are constantly positioned as sexual objects. Worldwide, child pornography and child sex trafficking are burgeoning industries. Real-world sexual violence against women is almost epidemic."
In this week's People magazine, University of Iowa Professor and author of The Lolita Effect, M.Gigi Durham discusses our culture's sexualization of younger and younger girls-and what we can do to protect our daughters. In a Q & A with Nina Burleigh, Durham has this advice for what parents can do to curb the The Lolita Effect: "Talk about how clothing sends signals. Convey that girls are multidimensional: athletic, artistic, intelligent. Sexuality is only one part."
The Arkansas Literary Festival takes place in Little Rock this weekend, April 3-6. This celebration of books and authors is presented each spring in Little Rock by Arkansas Literacy Councils, Inc. Proceeds benefit adult literacy programs, and the general public is warmly invited to celebrate literacy through admission-free sessions with authors, musicians, spoken word performers, and costumed characters. Attending this year's festival is Gigi Durham, author of the forthcoming The Lolita Effect, and novelist Tito Perdue, author of Fields of Asphodel and Lee.
By: Kirsty,
on 2/27/2008
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It may be called the International Polar Year, but it actually runs for two years. This time it is March 2007 to March 2009, so we’ll shortly be right in the middle of it. The IPY involves over 200 projects in the Arctic and Antarctic, with thousands of scientists from over 60 nations examining a wide range of physical, biological and social research topics. I was reading about this recently, and saw that the BBC website is running its own Antarctic Diary to coincide with the IPY. This put me in mind of OUP’s edition of Robert Falcon Scott’s Journals, edited by Max Jones, so I thought today I would bring you an excerpt from the last chapter: The Last March.
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By: Ben Zimmer,
on 1/10/2008
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The American Dialect Society has announced that the Word of the Year for 2007, as voted by members at its annual meeting, is subprime. It’s a sturdy choice, given how much media attention has circulated this past year about the financial crisis in the housing sector blamed on mortgage loans made to high-risk borrowers with credit ratings that are less than prime. Subprime (sometimes hyphenated as sub-prime) might not be as flashy as some previous selections by the ADS, such as truthiness in 2005 (comedian Stephen Colbert’s term for “truth from the gut” unencumbered by facts) or plutoed in 2006 (’demoted or devalued in the manner of Pluto losing planet status’). Nonetheless, the word has an intriguing history, even for people like me who aren’t terribly fascinated by the lending practices of banks.
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By: Stephanie,
on 12/19/2007
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By Anatoly Liberman
Etymologist, working sub specie aeternitatis, that is, routing among withered but durable leaves and dead (immortal?) roots, has seasonal stirrings. Of course, every month there are gleanings, but how much can a tiller, an inhabitant of a northern state, glean from barren furrows in December? Yet one more post and the year will be over—something to celebrate. (more…)
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By: Rebecca,
on 12/3/2007
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I’ve been blogging about the Place of the Week for nearly two years now, choosing a new location every seven days that I knew little about but had caught my attention or that appeared in the news. In the last year global warming has become much more than another subject debated within academia; in fact its found its way into our language, popular culture, and even our shopping habits. As I thought about this while I tried to pick my first Place of the Year, I kept coming back to the very visible ways the Earth’s landscape has been altered by the phenomena. (more…)
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By: Rebecca,
on 11/20/2007
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Jessica Prentice coined the word “locavore” which was chosen as the Oxford Word of the Year! We asked her how the word came about. Her answer is below.
There’s only one word for it: giddy. That’s how I’ve been feeling since reading the first email informing me that “locavore” was voted 2007’s “Word of the Year” by Oxford University Press. It’s the same feeling you have when you’re twelve years old and the guy you have a crush on gives you a valentine, and doesn’t give one to anyone else. You blush, you jump up and down in your seat, and you send excited text messages to the people you know will understand.
And how exciting to be asked to blog about it and be able to tell the story from my point of view! From the very beginning, the word “locavore” had legs. It’s actually been a fascinating phenomenon to watch: to see something that never existed before take on meaning and gather momentum. It’s also a phenomenon that would have been impossible before the internet. So, how did the word “locavore” come about? (more…)
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By: Ben Zimmer,
on 11/15/2007
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It’s always an exciting time at OUP when the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year is selected. As announced here on Monday, this year’s choice is locavore, meaning “a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced foods.” The word may very well strike a resonant chord for anyone who has mulled over how many miles a bunch of bananas has logged before it gets to the local grocery store. But unlike some of our previous Words of the Year — most recently, podcast in 2005 and carbon neutral in 2006 — locavore is very much “on the cusp,” not yet firmly established in widespread usage, despite its great potential. That means Oxford lexicographers will continue to monitor its progress to see if it eventually warrants inclusion in the next edition of NOAD.
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By: Rebecca,
on 11/12/2007
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It’s that time of the year again. It is finally starting to get cold (if you are worried about the global warming maybe you should become carbon-neutral) and the New Oxford American Dictionary is preparing for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year. The 2007 Word of the Year is (drum-roll please) locavore.
The past year saw the popularization of a trend in using locally grown ingredients, taking advantage of seasonally available foodstuffs that can be bought and prepared without the need for extra preservatives.
The “locavore” movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation. (more…)
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By: Rebecca,
on 9/13/2007
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Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Each year, on Rosh Hashanah mankind is judged and entered into the “book of life,” but the judgment is not final. We have ten days of atonement before Yom Kippur when the judgment is sealed. Below is a myth about atonement from The Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism by Howard Schwartz. Perhaps the example of Rabbi Abraham will inspire you. To read last year’s excerpt from The Tree of Souls click here.
A Vision at the Wailing Wall
In those days Rabbi Abraham Berukhim was known for performing the Midnight Vigil. He rose every night at midnight and walked through the streets of Safed, crying out, “Arise, for the Shekhinah is in exile, and our holy house is devoured by fire, and Israel faces great danger.” He longed, more than anything else, to bring the Shekhinah out of exile.
Now Rabbi Abraham was a follower of Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as the Ari. The Ari had great mystical powers. By looking at a man’s forehead he could read the history of his soul. He could overhear the angels and he knew the language of the birds. He could point out a stone in a wall and reveal whose soul was trapped in it. So too was he able to divine the future, and he always knew from the first day of Rosh ha-Shanah who among his disciples was destined to live or die. This knowledge he rarely disclosed, but once, when he learned there was a way to avert the decree, he made an exception. Summoning Rabbi Abraham Berukhim, he said: “Know, Rabbi Abraham, that a heavenly voice has gone forth to announce that this will be your last year among us—unless you do what is necessary to change the decree.” (more…)
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Carol Midgely looks at The Lolita Effect, by M. Gigi Durham, in The Times: "Last Halloween, Gigi Durham opened her front door to find a five-year-old girl standing on the doorstep. The child was wearing a boob tube, gauze miniskirt, platform heels and glitter eye-shadow. “I’m a Bratz!” she declared. Durham was put more in mind of a child prostitute that she had once seen in Cambodia. There wasn’t that much to choose between the two girls’ outfits.
