Is there a person in the country who thinks that dressing little girls up in Playboy T-shirts is a good idea, or who looks approvingly at photographs of Katie Price’s daughter, aged two, with make-up and straightened hair? There must be a tiny minority, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to buy padded bras for nine-year-olds. But the outcry that inevitably ensues when a supermarket starts selling “Lolita” beds or a shoe company starts making heels for toddlers tells you all you need to know about the discomfort and revulsion (and occasionally misplaced hysteria) with which such products are viewed.
So while it’s nice of David Cameron to express outrage at the sexualisation of children, as he did last week — the Tories were announcing plans to censure “inappropriate” marketing campaigns — you do kind of roll your eyes.
There is nothing wrong with the points Cameron makes about using children in marketing (bad), dressing them inappropriately (bad) or subjecting them to risqué song lyrics (bad). Indeed, he has raised the first two problems before, locking horns with Philip Green, the Topshop boss, in 2006 when he criticised the store for stocking a line of underwear called Little Miss Naughty. He also, in the same year, talked about the websites of teenage girls’ magazines, taking exception to a “rate my body” online competition. This is all fine — his objections were, and remain, valid.
But you do slightly wonder about the timing of this latest salvo. Cameron carefully calibrates everything he says to appeal to bien-pensant mummies everywhere, but in terms of the burning issues of the day, some disconcertingly tarty-looking young girl is hardly up there with children leaving school unable to read.
In the run-up to a general election, Cameron’s latest tirade has the whiff of positioning about it. Why is he returning to the subject now? People would like to know where his party stands on employment, borrowing and the like. I don’t think we care as much about what the top Tory thinks of children’s underwear and a rude word in a lyric.
Where are these “inappropriate” marketing campaigns, anyway? While the child-targeted ads on those kids’ cable channels are exasperating in their own unique and special way — too much pink, too much squealing — they are not, per se, offensive. On mainstream channels, I can’t recall seeing an advertising campaign that either featured or targeted children and thinking, “That’s disgraceful.”
Cameron also singled out Lily Allen’s musical output, describing how he had told his six-year-old daughter, Nancy, to stop listening to Allen’s music because of occasionally saucy lyrics.
This is bizarre — the last time I looked, Allen wasn’t writing music for infants. If you want listening that’s guaranteed to be family-appropriate, you buy a jumbo musical compilation featuring The Wheels on the Bus. Surely this is a matter for parental common sense; besides which, why single out a young woman who is rather a good role model?
Musicians of every sort have been writing extraordinarily explicit lyrics since music began — and quite right too. Bessie Smith was born in 1894 and I would think twice about playing my kids some of her writhing, steamy, sexually laden vocals (“I want a little stain on my clothes”), even though on paper you’d think, aah, some lovely old-fashioned blues, how charming and how unlike the vulgar popular beat combos of today.
I also think there’s a thin and underreported line between “sexualisation” and good old dressing-up. When I was small, one of my greatest pleasures was playing with my mother’s make-up and trying on her heels and jewellery. If this had happened today and anyone had taken a picture of me, the before-and-after shots would have scandalised our sensitivities. But a liking for dressing-up is a tried and tested part of childhood — it’s a tried and tested part of life; otherwise no adult would be interested in clothes and we’d all go to parties in our pyjamas. Equally, little girls’ desire to be like their mothers is hardly new and hardly reprehensible.
I realise that lunching with a child in eyeshadow is not the same as sending her to school in a T-shirt featuring the Playboy bunny — but we have policies to ensure that the latter scenario would be met with, at the least, a teacher having a word with the parents.
We don’t, unlike America, have a tradition of child beauty pageants; the high street isn’t stuffed to the rafters with shops selling mesh bodystockings for toddlers; most people, if asked, would tell you that they disapprove of both notions.
There’s a danger that we might all become hysterical on this subject. In an interview with last week’s Sunday Times Style section, Johnnie Boden, Old Etonian mate of Cameron and purveyor of middle-class clothing, said his company couldn’t possibly sell women’s knickers. The bizarre implication was that middle-class people who consider themselves wholesome — holidays in Cornwall, wooden toys, pinafore dresses — shudder at the thought of underpants. More, shudder at the thought of looking at underpants in a clothing catalogue. I find this weird in the extreme, I must say, but it’s another way in which the middle-class differentiate themselves from — what? The plebs who don’t have a problem with gussets?
I don’t like these demarcations, and I don’t like the way dressing up to look like your mum is allowed only if your mum dresses like a model of probity — and I don’t like the suggestion that if your mum likes pink, glittery clothes in man-made fabrics, she is automatically a bad parent. What it boils down to is a question of taste — some have it, some don’t, and there you go. It’s hardly a matter for legislation.
As for Cameron: you could argue that, even as he deplores the use of children in these inappropriate ways, he is using children inappropriately himself for political gain. He attacks the marketing of and to children, but isn’t he doing exactly the same thing when he uses them in a speech that he knows will resonate perfectly with the sensibilities of his target voters?
+ Much disgruntled grumbling about Gok Wan, presenter of Channel 4’s How to Look Good Naked, being invited onto Desert Island Discs. Critics say this is yet another sign of terrible dumbing-down and cite comparison with past guests — Noël Coward, Peter Ustinov — as a mark of the programme’s decline.
What unbelievable nonsense. Gok Wan has made a career out of making “ordinary” women feel good about themselves, without ever resorting to blunt speaking, snarkiness or humiliation. Recently, his series featured three episodes that took depressed, unattractive-feeling women with disabilities and gave them brilliant makeovers — it was impossible to watch without welling up. On top of that, he’s a formerly obese, half-Chinese gay man from Leicester who was bullied at school.
He’s got plenty to say and he says it very well (dodgy musical taste, though). Would you rather listen to him or to some boring captain of industry or self-congratulating thesp giving a lesson in false modesty?
Pfft. No contest.
india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk
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India Knight was born in 1965 and lives in London with her three children. She writes a weekly column for The Sunday Times; her novels and non-fiction are published by Penguin. She has blogged about bringing up a child with special needs and her personal blog is here.
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India Knight was born in 1965 and lives in London with her three children. She writes a weekly column for The Sunday Times; her novels and non-fiction are published by Penguin. She has blogged about bringing up a child with special needs and her personal blog is here.
The Editor of the TLS writes on books, people and politics
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