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When little girls wear make-up, they send out sexual signals
No one can seriously imagine that children are innocent, in the sentimental sense of the word. As Ivy Compton-Burnett said: "I wonder who thought of the innocence of children. It must have been a person of great originality."
Of course, children are not and never have been guileless, harmless or sexless little creatures. They are, however, immature and defenceless, and they do need protection. That might seem to be something we all take for granted these days, at least in rich societies.
The Western world is child-obsessed, preoccupied as never before by the countless subtle risks of child-rearing and the awesome responsibilities of so-called parenting. Contemporary hysteria about paedophiles might seem to be further evidence of our obsession with the need to protect children, and particularly with the need to protect them from the sexual interest of adults.
Yet the curious thing is that, for all this protestation, we protect children less and less. We neglect them, handing them over to creches, childminders and underpaid au pairs; we leave them, all too often, to come home to empty houses and to bring themselves up.
Moreover, so far from protecting young children from adult sexuality, some people actually seem keen to launch them into it, long before their time. Others, if not positively anxious to turn their little girls into pre-teen jail-bait, do little to stop it, or to protest at the commercial forces driving their misguided little moppets in that direction. There is a strange inconsistency in all this; it is hardly surprising that children and teenagers are confused.
This week there has been a great deal of fuss about the magazine Mad About Boys, which is aimed at girls between nine and 12. It deals with clothes, make-up, dieting, fashion and even with dating, as in how to "look delish for your first date".
For once, I think the tabloid harrumphing is justified. The way that this magazine exploits and excites little girls is despicable. All the same, there must be a willing market for this kind of stuff. That is to say, there must be parents who will give their children money to buy it.
And there are parents who let their infants buy make-up from the Glitter Babes range, sold by none other than Boots. One nice middle-class mummy interviewed last week said she had already taught her four-year-old daughter Poppy to use moisturiser every day. There are even successful beauty parlours for children, including a mobile service called Mini Makeovers, so that pre-teen nymphets can be taught how to tart themselves up, or down.
Children may not strictly speaking be innocent, but there is none the less an innocence that is being violated by all this. I am not only talking about little girls being smothered with slap, or being pushed into professional baby beauty contests, where they totter about, mincing and lisping in a ghastly parody of their mothers' sexual fantasies.
I mean something much wider, which affects boys, too. I mean the increasing sexualisation of society, to use a nasty neologism for a nasty, newish thing. In more and more of what they do, children are being enticed into the world of adult sexuality. With that world come the many anxieties surrounding sex - about weight and shape and fashion and pulling power, and with those preoccupations come the opportunity for others to excite and exploit them. It is a rape of childhood.
Make-up is clearly about sex. People may not want to believe it: they may call it "grooming", or say that little girls love to play make-believe with mummy's lipstick. Maybe, but the swollen red lips, the widened eyes and the flushed cheeks produced by careful, adult make-up are not intended only to be beautiful; they are also intended to provoke sexual interest, by mimicking sexual interest. That is why it looks so disturbing on children, or ought to; it is odd for someone well below puberty to be giving off such signals, and dangerous, too, because they only partly know how powerful they are.
Much more importantly, most pop music is explicitly about sex - it is one long mating call. The dancing that pop music inspires is the most obvious kind of overt sexual display. I often wonder why people do not feel more inhibited about it.
The kind of dancing usually seen in this country is not the most alluring kind of sexual display, but in its all too often crude and unco-ordinated way, it is unmistakably simulated sex, the bumping and grinding of a third-rate hooker.
It is very odd to see tiny children doing this, often rather better than adults, with (I imagine) little idea of how suggestive it is, or of what. I was astonished when my three-year-old son won a disco dancing competition in a local park, to which some other people had taken him; he was as sinuous and snake-hipped as the alarming Michael Jackson, whom he must have seen on television.
It seems very sad that children should be pressed into seeing themselves, and being seen, as sexual creatures long before they are sexually developed. It seems wrong that they should be introduced, years before puberty, to the adult neuroses about body and food and clothes and status that go with sexual maturity. It is wrong that they should be confronted in their immaturity with forces that even adults find overwhelming.
Childhood ought to be a time of freedom from all that; if it isn't, there is no point in our pretending that we protect our children, or even care about them very much.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, February 10, 2001
Comments:
I had this discussion with my 11 y/o daughter last night. She cried and cried when she, again, asked if she could start wearing make-up. But I'm the "Overprotective Dad" who doesn't want his girl to have all this attention when she gets enough like it is. I know ive got a long row to hoe. Wish me luck. Im not budging an inch on this.
Posted by: Scott Smith | 6 Jul 2005 14:24:35
I don't think children think of sexuallity or even have much of an idea of make-up as being sexual so much as they like to mimic what they see. Perhaps today we are living in a society in which children should know of sex and sexually dangers, since everything today seems to circle around that idea that everything marketable today is sex related. Maybe the age of innocence is over. I know I would want my children to be aware of sex at an early age, maybe when they get hormones they will be better educated on how to control them, and won't be subject to getting hurt by child malestors.
Posted by: Grace | 29 Jul 2005 00:10:41
hi my name is mogul and im not married
so i dont really know what ure saying but when i do become a father i will definatley think about this
Posted by: mogul | 23 Feb 2008 00:31:40
hi, my daughter is five and I am going through a battle with my mother-in-law who is 56 years old and still dresses like a punk. She is encouraging my daughter to play with dolls such as barbie/bratz although she knows how I feel about these dolls and she entices her to want to wear make-up. This is causing loads of family arguments between my partner and me as I feel she is deliberately ignoring my wishes and putting my daughter up against me. I feel we are allowing our children to grow-up well before they have been kids and some may say they are only dolls, but this is not the case, they play a big part in what our kids learn as kids learn through play and what they see. It has come to the point where it looks as if my partner and I will be separating as the safety of our daughter comes first.
Posted by: Mellissa | 4 Mar 2008 16:01:07
All this talk of pedophiles is retarded. Pedophiles are attracted to CHILDREN. They find CHILDISH features attractive. I've known a few in my day, and they've all expressed that little girls wearing make-up is a turn OFF, not a turn ON. Why would it be? If they wanted painted hussies, they'd be attracted to grown women. You guys have got this thing completely backwards.
Posted by: Galen | 8 Apr 2008 10:14:07
