Stephen Lunn, Steve Biddulph, the sexualisation of children and working in a factory at the age of ten

(Above: this site is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Leonard Whiting when 17 showing his buns, alongside 16 year old Olivia Hussey in staunch Roman Catholic director Franco Zeffirelli's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet).

Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she—God rest all Christian souls!—
Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God.
She was too good for me. But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.

The "end of the world is nigh" syndrome takes many forms. Take Stephen Lunn's anxiety inducing article Under-age hard sell, in which he spends many words lathering up the notion that the "sexualisation of children" is taking us close to the edge of the precipice.

The sexualisation of children is one of those peculiar phrases that strike me as something that could only be invented in an alienated new millenium.

It somehow suggests that until they're sexualised, children aren't sexual creatures. Yet they arrive in the world with sex organs, and over time they become aware of their sex and their sexuality.

While it's a faddish word and concept - people now attend conferences dedicated to the concept so they can anguish over it -  the concept simply doesn't make any sense, except as a catchphrase to denote the kind of sexuality for the young that's just been devised by the media and advertisers to sell goods. 

As if the media and the intertubes are imposing sex on kids who are blank sheets, malleable empty vessels devoid of sex.

Not if you accept kids are created by sex, experience sex and sexuality in childhood - their own and others - and grow in their understanding of this sex and sexuality as they grow older. 

The distinction between seeing a child prostitute in the street and an objectified image of a woman in a magazine is a fine one, and the notion that kids if left alone would wander in some Blakeian cloud of innocence is one of the finer delusions of wowsers and people with simply no awareness of the history or sociology of human sexuality (for a surface skirmish, go here, or plunge into Foucault's History of Sexuality).

Which is not to say that I'm  a big fan of JonBenet Ramsey syndrome, which is as bizarre as middle aged women clutching at toy dogs for a substitute world of emotion. But let's separate personal prejudices from the end of civilization as we know it, because truth to tell, just because I can't stand all the dog droppings in the streets of Paris doesn't mean the French are completely uncivilized.

Lunn spends his entire article chewing over all the dangers the young face in this troubled world. Which it seems to me is the kind of dangers faced by affluent well heeled young middle class folk:

From the influence on girls and boys of the portrayal of women as sexual playthings on Sunday morning music videos, to easy access to pornography via the internet, to discussions of sex in magazines read by primary school children, to the marketing of suggestive clothing to girls as young as five, parents are starting to steam.

Well here's five to ten they're not starting to steam in the same way in Nigeria or the slums of Mumbai. Since my guess is they'd be a bit more worried about food, shelter, and the avoidance of rape, while not averse to a little television or a dial up connection to the intertubes if they could work out how to fund it.

On and on goes Lunn listing the ways the government needs to intervene, parents need to shape up or ship out, and self-regulation has to give way to proactive prohibition. Yep, it's back to banning things:

"Self-regulation doesn't work," Biddulph says. "Corporations that do harm always propose self-regulation as a tactic for delaying or preventing legislation.

"There is clear evidence that sexual content harms children. We simply need a national body that proactively prohibits both advertising and products in the public space that sexualise children or harms them in other ways."

Well that's a broad brief. Won't someone think of the children? Harms them in other ways?Well that's an even broader brief. What on earth does he mean? Watching Transformers and G. I. Joe is likely to turn children - and adults -  into gibbering automatons, but should we ban crap simply because it's crap? (Did you like the end of the New York Times review of G. I. Joe? Numerous and completely unscientific studies have shown that a steady diet of idiotic entertainment can be harmful to your health).

But back to Lunn, and his anxiety attack over the children:

Perhaps the last, sobering words can be Biddulph's.

"The romantic, tentative and tender feelings of young people would surprise many adults. But these positive and loving qualities can be easily battered, bruised and driven underground if the culture does not reinforce them. There is no poetry left.

"For the boys, conditioned by online porn and compliant but disengaged girls, sex may come to have no more meaningful than an ice cream or a pizza.

"For millions of girls, sex has become a performance, anxiously overlaid with worry about how do I look? What sexual tricks does he expect or not expect? How do I compare with all the others he has slept with?

"Little wonder we have one of the most depressed, anxious and lonely generations of young people ever to inhabit the earth."

Well I guess that also means that the parents who've raised or are raising or are about to raise the most depressed, anxious and lonely generations ever to inhabit the earth must by definition themselves be one of the most depressed, anxious and lonely generation ever to stalk the earth.

As the abject, aberrant failures that they are.

Dear god, should I go outside and blow my brains out right now? Or can I last to the weekend in my depressed, anxious and lonely condition?

Perhaps we could have a shoot out between baby boomers, Gen X, Y and Z, to see just who is the loneliest, most depressed and most anxious of the generations? Oh pick me, pick me, says donkey. I'm a bigger bipolar manic depressive fear monger than you are.

What is it with people who fear life and sex, and say such profoundly stupid things as "There is no poetry left"?

It turns out that Steve Biddulph, who has this last word in Lunn's piece, is a psychologist. By golly, he knows how to make me feel quite scientological, and who'd have thought anyone would want to go down that path? 

Quick, here's a bit of poetry I found before the Farenheit 451 squad landed on my door trying to save young Juliet from getting into an arranged marriage:

PARIS : But now, my lord, what say you to my suit?

CAPULET: But saying o'er what I have said before:
My child is yet a stranger in the world;
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

PARIS: Younger than she are happy mothers made.

CAPULET: And too soon marr'd are those so early made.
The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,
She is the hopeful lady of my earth:
But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,
My will to her consent is but a part;
An she agree, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice.

Well of course that naughty young Juliet thing prefers to go off with her true romantic love - himself not yet with beard - than settle for the arranged marriage. Now as Germaine Greer points out, Shakespeare made a big fuss about Juliet's age because marriage at a young age wasn't that common in Elizabethan times. And I think we can agree that young romantic love ends rather badly in this particular case.

But what it is also true to say is that the notion of the "sexualization of children" sneaking up on them, with the help of advertising and the intertubes and the mass media, is a peculiar condition only lately come upon us and the young.

FUD comes in all shapes and sizes, but Biddulph's last sobering words, as quoted by Lunn, are a super sized conflation which suggests that you might have been better off as a young working class girl in Victorian England. Which meant in London you might have been one of the twenty per cent of children who had any kind of schooling, because you might well have been down coal mine for 12 hours a day, or off in cotton mill for eight (if under the age of 11), or be one of the many child prostitutes roaming the streets. (for more details of working conditions, check out details of child labor in section seven here).

You don't even have to been Charles Dickens writing about his own experience as a child worker in David Copperfield to realize that child labor still goes on in many places in the world, such as Pakistan, to feed westerners their consumer items, over which they can then become agitated as signs of conspicuous consumption.

Is it too much trouble to suggest that some of the concerned citizens who get terribly excited about the unhappiest generation ever to roam the world take a bex and have a good lie down?

Things might be bad, but I have it on good authority that the end of the world has been postponed until at least the end of the year, and that some children might even grow up and enjoy life and relationships and sex and the whole damn thing.

In fact I suspect your kids are tougher than you suspect or allow, and I know for a fact that they'll outlive me ...

(Below: Brooke Shields in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, made in 1978, long before the intertubes were born, about a pre-teen girl growing up in a house of prostitution in 1917 in the red-light district of New Orleans, long before modern advertising. And don't get me started on Blue Lagoon).