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Jon Benet Murder and the Sexualization of Young Girls

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Since I watch/read a lot of news, over the past couple of weeks I couldn't help but to have the Jon Benet murder speculation shoved down my throat by the corporate mass media (CMM).

Iraq? The US/Israeli attack on Lebanon? Hell no, none hold up to the CMM's titillation of showing a little girl dressed up and strutting around like a 20-year old.

But nowhere have I seen a better analysis of the whole phenomenon than this Los Angeles Times article entitled, "No Escaping Sexualization of Young Girls".

The mother who wrote the article places the sexualization of young girls right on target -- placed squarely on corporate America.

A few quotes from the article where she describes taking her kids on a shopping trip:

We headed toward Limited Too, where we found thong-like underwear sized for 7-year-old girls. My 4-year-old was entranced: "Mommy, those underpants have no walls!"

We soldiered on, through Old Navy (where the toddler section carries clothes that make 2-year-olds look like Britney Spears), through Toys R Us (where ads for the scantily clad Bratz Babyz dolls, with their bottles and their painted toenails, boast that these "Babyz already know how to flaunt it, and they're keepin' it real in the crib!"), and past the Disney Store (where little girls can covet seashell bikinis like those worn by the Little Mermaid and glittery halter tops like those worn by Princess Jasmine in the surprisingly broad-minded sultanate of Agrabah).

By the time we made it to CVS Pharmacy, I thought we were out of the woods. Wrong. Those bare-midriffed Disney princesses are everywhere — even, it turns out, on diapers sized for people weighing 18 to 34 pounds.

In our hyper-commercialized consumerist society, there's virtually no escaping the relentless sexualization of younger and younger children. My 26-month-old daughter didn't emerge from the womb clamoring for a seashell bikini like Princess Ariel's — but now that she's savvy enough to notice who's prancing around on her pull-ups, she wants in on the bikini thing. And my 4-year-old wasn't born demanding lip gloss and nail polish, but when a little girl at nursery school showed up with her Hello Kitty makeup kit, she was hooked.

In a culture in which the sexualization of childhood is big business — mainstream mega-corporations such as Disney earn billions by marketing sexy products to children too young to understand their significance — is it any wonder that pedophiles feel emboldened to claim that they shouldn't be ostracized for wanting sex with children? On an Internet bulletin board, one self-avowed "girl lover" offered a critique of this week's New York Times series on pedophilia: "They fail, of course, to mention the hypocrisy of Hollywood selling little girls to millions of people in a highly sexualized way." I hate to say it, but the pedophiles have a point here.

Ask many social conservatives and they'll blame the decline of moral values on liberals or whoever. This woman makes a very strong point that much of the sexualization of young girls (and boys) is being marketed to people and sold as the latest, greatest new thing by mainstream corporate America.

With that in mind, I suppose I should not have been insulted by the CMM wasting precious news time on the trivial (in the big picture) issue of the murder of a young girl a decade ago. After all, Disney owns ABC and I'm sure the CMM is just reflecting what their owners want and their advertisers want to sell -- and that's exactly the problem.

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Wasting precious news time

Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2006-08-30 21:16.

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With that in mind, I suppose I should not have been insulted by the CMM wasting precious news time on the trivial (in the big picture) issue of the murder of a young girl a decade ago.

That's how I felt during the 1998 coverage of Monica Lewinsky. Doesn't the country have something better to worry about?

As you've pointed out, surely this is not just about ratings. Listening to CNN drone on and on about the same thing for 6 months is boring! And who cares about that missing girl in Aruba? What about the missing children from poor or non-white families? I guess we need to read our milk cartons to hear about them.

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