Photo by Flickr user SunriseOn7. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Lilith of Evil Slutopia fingers the bullshit double standard that's significantly not on display regarding Vanity Fair's overwhelmingly sexualizing cover and photo spread on 16-year-old Justin Bieber. (The photos, which I'm obviously too polite to repost here, show Bieber covered with lipstick, with 10 different women's disembodied hands pawing him, shown in vaseline-softened-lens focus with his shirt unbuttoned, etc.)

If Miley Cyrus had, at age 16, posed for similar photographs there would have been a huge scandal, everyone from the ladies of the View to Bill O'Reilly would be talking about it, Vanity Fair would be accused of oversexualizing teenagers, Miley would be called a slut, and she would be forced to issue an apology about how sorry and embarrassed she was. (There might even be an action alert from the One Million Moms.)

Source: Evil Slutopia

I think that's about right. By 16 many children, both boys and girls, are perfectly capable of sexual feelings, and are already often in the midst of sexual exploration. With each other! And to a point in development terms it's perfectly natural, normal, and healthy. Again, with each other!

What's going on here, with the considerable adult sexualization of Bieber, is neither normal, natural, or healthy!

Since haven't historically placed a property-value premium on boy's virginity we tend not to see anything wrong with precocious sexualization or adult predation. Especially when the sexualization is heterosexual. But adult sexual intervention in child sexual development still fucks them up.

Bieber, like Cyrus, like all children, is not an adult plaything. Sexualizing him is not ok for him. It might seem funny to adults but it's not a joke. It's not that he's a boy, it's not that Cyrus was a girl. It's that in cognitive and social (if not physical) terms they're still children!

One of the things that basically characterizes an adult is that two or four years isn't all that long. But for children the period from roughly 14 to 18 is really, really critical. In two years Bieber will almost certainly have completed his psychological and social maturation and will thus be prepared for all the real adult sex and sexuality he wants. If he doesn't get it then like waaaaaay too many others before him he's likely to retain a very juvenile and also likely dysfunctional approach to sex. For the remaining 60-80 odd years he's an adult. Why short-circuit all that for a few titillating shits and giggles now?

Sweet mother of pearl!

Update: In comments an anonymous poster pointed out Amelia McDonell-Parry's shameful deplorable sexualization of then-minors Nick Jonas and Taylor Lautner in a Frisky post called "21 Guys We’re Ashamed To Say We’d Totally Screw."

If Anonymous is seriously concerned about the issue of sexual predation on adolescent boys as well as girls, and not (as I sort of get the impression) just pointing out equivalences in order to excuse doing nothing about male predation on girls, he might want to take a look at Lil Wayne and the Problem of Confusing Sexual Assault Victims With Male Sexual Role Models as well. In that case Wayne's male mentor ordered him to accept a blowjob he'd ordered a teenage girl to perform.  Which, when you think about it... as Wayne himself has... is doubly screwed up.

Video link via Rachel Hills

Speaking of adults creating a culture of sexual pressure for young people before they’re ready, here’s Hugo Schwyzer on increasing sexualization of girls. (Emphasis mine.)

Ariel Levy, in her powerful and controversial Female Chauvinist Pigs, quoted Paris Hilton’s remarkably perceptive remark about herself that she was “sexy, but not sexual.” Hilton isn’t alone. My students today, who are mostly in their late teens (though I have many older ones as well) were deeply influenced by Hilton, who was at the peak of her notoriety four or five years ago, when these now-college freshman were just entering high school. And sadly, not unlike many of their older sisters, they find themselves stuck in what we might call the “Paris Paradox”.

Young women with the Paris Paradox were raised in a culture that promised sexual freedom, but what they ended up with looked a lot more like obligation than opportunity. It’s not hard to understand why the pressure to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to discover one’s authentic sexuality. As Levy and Martin and others have been pointing out for the past decade, we’ve begun to sexualize girls at ever earlier ages, as anyone who noticed the Halloween costumes marketed to tween girls will be aware. The explicitness — the raunchiness, to use Levy’s word — of this sexualization is relatively new. But when that sexualization (or pornification, to use another popular term) meets the far-older pressure on young women to be people-pleasers, we have a recipe for misery.

Source: Hugo Schwyzer

See also Rachel Hills who points out that a term even more accurate than sexualization is objectification. That sounds pretty good. Girls obviously aren’t the only children subjected to sexualizing pressure. But they’re certainly subjected to it. And, pace Rachel Hills, girls are definitely pressured by objectification by adults in way that boys definitely aren’t.

The key point, and the reason I’m quoting Schwyzer rather than Hills, is that I really appreciate his broader point that what’s nominally being presented to girls, especially, as new opportunities for sexual agency, expression, and self-determination is actually being presented as more of the same old obligation to perform. The expectation used to be to perform modesty, now the pressure’s on to perform “sluttiness.” In no case, however, is there latitude for girls to figure it out, on their own, for themselves.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says

As you no doubt know, I love Kate Harding and usually nod firmly at her blog posts. But I have to disagree with this one she wrote about a woman named Neenah Pickett, who gave herself a year to find a husband and kept a blog called 52 Weeks 2 Find Him Blog. I firmly agree with Kate that narratives that tell women they must be passive (or passive aggressive) to “catch” a man are sexist and not as effective as advertised, and that the portrayal of men as being composed of nothing but tender ego and skittishness—-where any kind of expectation-setting from a woman is sure to scare them off—-is also ridiculous. But I can’t help but disagree with her about whether or not it’s a good idea to make it a goal to find your spouse and give yourself a time limit to do so, and it’s really not a good idea to advertise it.

...

And the reason is quite simple: No one enjoys being objectified. Call us hopeless romantics, but most of us want to fall in love, and to have someone else adore us for our unique selves.

Read the quote in context here.

“the reason is quite simple: No one enjoys being objectified.”

This.

Nobody wants to be “a piece of ass” and nobody wants to be “a husband” because those are things, not people, to the individual seeking them.

In a reply in comments Amanda adds

Exuding the “I just need a wife, please fill that role and quickly” is perversely going to get that goal further and further out of reach, as the good ones rightfully want to be treated like utterly charming, unique individuals.

A year or two out of college my long-time partner came out and left me for another woman. She explained her decision to her friends with very generous words about my suitability as a partner in all regards but my biology. This combination of factors, it turned out, briefly made me the most eligible bachelor on the planet as far as a surprising number of impatiently single women in the neighborhood were concerned.

It wasn’t even as much fun as it sounds.

Meanwhile potential partners who weren’t impatiently single generally gave me a lot of space to get over what was a seriously traumatic separation for me.

That said, I think she’s a bit off the mark to label the behavior “desperate.” It’s something more like “instrumental.” Here’s what I mean.

Funny but true story: decades ago I was at a Halloween party. We were hanging out with a mixed group of friends and towards the end of the evening one of the men, who was dressed up like an old prospector, stands up, gathered up his various props, including a shovel and with absolutely no trace of self-awareness said “it’s getting late. I’m going to see if I can’t dig up a girl.”

That wasn’t about desperation, but it wasn’t exactly about forming a peer relationship either. Since his intention was just to get laid he didn’t particularly care who he got laid with. Which I’m sure made everyone he approached feel really unique and special… and previously engaged.

Which is pretty much exactly how I felt when I was being trolled for my long-term relationship potential. It wasn’t that they were desperate, it’s that they were driven by their purpose rather than by any person.

So yeah, it felt like a job interview. But worse, it felt like an interview for a job I wasn’t applying for.

It’s great if you say “enough dallying, I’m going to go out and meet people, reassess assumptions, criteria, and habits that make me unavailable or undesirable, and see what happens.” Saying “52 weeks from now I’m going to be married,” or for that matter “I’m going to go dig up a girl tonight” is something else altogether.

That’s what I thought Amanda meant.

Holly of The Pervocracy tackles “relationship advice” from a recent issue of Glamour magazine

“How to tell him to get better clothes: ...You lie next to your peacefully sleeping boyfriend. After making sure he’s down for the count, you sneak over to his dresser, shove a couple of particularly awful items in a bag and hurry out the door.”

NO. Do not do this. Do not fucking destroy someone else’s property because it offends your aesthetics. It’s not cute, it’s not mischievous, it’s not funny, and it’s not something you fucking do. Maybe he hates some of the things you own, you know that? Would you like your stuff to just disappear with a tee-hee and a “now we can get you things I like”? I don’t fucking think so.

She said it here.

She brings up more of the same this time from Cosmopolitan

“Why you should check his E-mail: Never read his e-mail, but a glance at his in-box can give you some insight into the kind of person he is.”

No. No no no no no. The inbox is up there with the medicine cabinet and the diary on the list of places you are just not invited. You creep. And “oh, of course reading is wrong but it’s okay to just skim” ...really? Come on.

Source

To be extravagantly gender-aware for once boyfriends are no more dolls to be dressed and scripted than girlfriends are scores or trophies of games.

The other day in comments Sungold asked, roughly, whether I thought women are brought up first to sacrifice themselves for their men or for their children. And while I can’t answer that well I can say that the way we have always raised girls might make it as difficult for them to relate to their male partners as the way we raise boys to relate to theirs.

We are in fact all human beings, men, women, and children. Not pieces, not property, not “ours” or “his” or “hers” or “theirs.” And so to want “a baby” or to want “a girlfriend” or to want “a husband” and especially to sacrifice to get those things is to lose track of what an honor it is to be with another person, to get to be with their being while they’re with us whether it’s by choice or chance or necessity. It’s also to miss the extraordinary pleasure of being with someone instead of something.

Cosmo and Glamour for women, like Details and Esquire for men, aren’t entirly to blame for this by the way. They only encourage patterns we begin in childhood but for whatever reason (including continuing encouragement from magazines and their sponsors) hang on to when we’re grown.