Last week, I attended my daughter's school dance recital. While her second grade class, thankfully, did a performance that celebrated the strength of their bodies, the third and fourth graders performed dances that were suggestively sexual in aesthetics and movement. The girls -- although not the boys -- were dressed in short shorts and tight halter tops, shaking butts and breasts that they did not have. The girls seemed uncomfortable and very self-conscious, while the boys moved with a total sense of ease and fun.
Let's be clear, I think it is really important for girls to understand their sexuality and to feel confident in their bodies. Yet, it honestly makes me uncomfortable to see 8 and 9-year-old girls sexualizing themselves and being sexualized.
Our daughters, even before their bodies take shape into adolescence and early womanhood, are encouraged to wear push-up bras, lipstick and thongs. Does this give girls a healthy sense of their sexuality -- or reduce them into eroticized commodities before they have an opportunity to understand their own bodies? Unfortunately, I believe it is the latter.
Young girls, against the cultural backdrop of sexualized imagery, are not demonstrating the behavior of liberated and self-actualized girls. In fact, it's the reverse. They are more vulnerable to low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders.
And, I hate to make this juxtaposition -- especially for fear that I might be tagged a backward feminist or hyperbolic mother -- but there is a very thin divide between what I see playing out in popular culture's oversexualization of girls and the legitimization of very young girls being trafficked and sold for sex. As a human rights lawyer and advocate, I am in a daily struggle to end the exploitation and trafficking of underage girls for sex. I cannot help but see the connection between sexualizing a 12-year-old girl and then making it easy, tolerated, condoned and possible to purchase her for sex.
How do I teach my daughter to honor herself, to confidently celebrate her feminine identity -- in all its dimensions, contradictions and sacredness -- as she moves into the tween and adolescent years? How do we mothers raise our young daughters to take pride in their sexuality when it is time, and in a manner that does not play into this wrongheaded sexualization of their bodies? I hear mothers -- and fathers -- asking these questions all the time. Whether it is at school, on the play ground, or birthday parties, parents are discussing our fears about raising daughters in a culture that so quickly sexualizes them.
So, this is a shout out to other parents to make the health and well-being of our daughters a public square conversation. It is time to insist that our girls have a chance at being girls before they are subject to a suffocating landscape of merchandise, media and popular cultural imagery that turns the female body into a sexual object. And it is time to give our daughters new images of female power, agency and sexuality.
Follow Malika Saada Saar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rights4girls
http://www.themommypsychologist.com/2012/03/03/princess-on-the-playground/
Oh, and my two year old would/will probably love dance classes. She dances around the room whenever any song comes on and tries to mimic any dance moves she sees. I had to change the channel on my 16 year old brother in law who was watching VH1 when we were visiting. I walked into the room to see my two year old doing a perfect rendition of Beyonce's booty shaking dance moves. My mom tells me I did the same thing to Madonna songs in the 80's. Keep up the good fight.
Fathers have every right to be outraged by the sexualization of their daughters. Hopefully those feelings will get them thinking about the women around them and in media images and how they relate to the female form.