Abstract
Focused on Canada and the United States, Sext Up Kids (2012) aims to raise awareness about how and why the increasing sexualization of mainstream media results in the damaging sexualization of childhood. Within the limitations of heteronormativity, this documentary strives to make a causal link between young people’s use of social media and their sexual attitudes and behaviors. The film spotlights key findings of recent research studies from a range of academic disciplines. Viewers are informed of new dangers posed by a volatile mixture of hypersexual pop culture and technology, with a particular focus on smartphones and social media. Sext Up Kids skillfully uses expert testimonials, statistics, and case studies to reveal significant threats to our children’s mental health, physical health, and social well-being. In particular, a disturbing new set of norms have resulted in increasing numbers of tweens and teens using social media to consume and produce sexually explicit material.
The film’s argument builds from a foundation of examining how today’s efforts to market to children and teens contribute to the sexualization of children. Viewers learn a disturbing motto from the marketing industry: KAGOY, the acronym for “kids are getting older younger.” Examples of children’s clothing, including a French lingerie line for girls 4 to 12 years old, show us how advertisers are “making prepubescent girls look like porn stars.” We see how pressures to look sexy at younger ages come with pressures to act sexy at younger ages. These images are juxtaposed against statistics about younger boys having increased access to internet pornography. Research findings sound the alarm that boys overconsumption of pornography may rob them of their abilities to enjoy healthy sex lives.
The roots of the pornification (Paasonen, Nikunen, and Saarenmaa 2007) of youth are traced to ever-younger boys accessing hardcore porn via the Internet and to girls idolizing hyperfeminine role models, starting with “playing princess” as preschoolers. Peggy Orenstein is featured and draws on her 2011 book to critique this type of play, explaining that needing to be “the fairest of them all” too often turns into needing to be “the hottest” of them all by the time girls reach their tween years. This chronological shift—from a seven-year-old playing with a princess Barbie to an eight-year-old more focused on sexier dolls (e.g., Bratz and Monster High dolls)—is linked to damaging girls’ self-esteem and distorting their attitudes about how they should look and act.
Moving into teen years, we see girls pressured to produce and share “porn star performances” via social media. In the vein of “Girls Gone Wild,” tween and teen girls are increasingly using social media to present themselves as sexual, as sex objects to please boys. This behavior corresponds with reports of increasing acceptance of and expectation for teen girls to perform oral sex on boys they desire. Experts in the film warn that the more girls perform via social media and in person for the purpose of pleasing boys, the less they prioritize expressing their own desires and having their own needs—not only for sex but more so for romance—met by boys.
Throughout the documentary, viewers are introduced to disturbing case studies. An educator from British Columbia tells of seventh-grade girls sending topless photos of themselves via cell phone to boys on whom they had crushes. We also meet several teen girls who speak of their regrets for past sexting. All of these cautionary tales tie into nonreciprocal norms of girls having learned to “act sexy for boys.”
The film presents a compelling social critique of technology outpacing both norms and laws. Smartphones, presumably designed for use by adults, are being used by children and teens who have been socialized within generational norms to have little concern for privacy. These young users underestimate the psychological, social, and legal dangers of sexting until it is too late—until they have been harmed by sexting. A male high school teacher tells us that “their tolerance for sexual imagery is very, very high.” He then points out that social media (like twitter) allows tweens and teens to experience media in a more personal way: “ … there isn’t that distance anymore between the media event and the viewer’s experience of that event.” As with past generations, kids today idolize young celebrities, pop stars, and teen idols. But, now they can connect with those celebrities many times a day via Facebook and Twitter. Viewers will be convinced that technology-mediated communication is accelerating the level of intimacy experienced by children’s and teens as they consume and produce social media.
Gail Dines, also featured, expands on arguments from her 2011 book to argue that today’s young celebrities epitomize the unhealthy influence of pornography on mainstream culture. Citing Katy Perry’s choice of sexually explicit costumes and the trajectory of Miley Cyrus’s increasingly sexualized public image, Dines asserts that girls today face a harsh dilemma: “ … to be visible, you have two choices in a hypersexual society: you’re either fuckable or invisible … it is developmentally out of step with adolescence to choose invisibility.” So, to increase “visibility,” more girls and boys are repackaging themselves—constructing their social presentations of self (Goffman 1959) by selecting images and text to use on Facebook and in texts to increase the likelihood that they will be seen as sexually desirable.
The film succeeds in accomplishing its stated goals: to be an “exploration of the sexualization of childhood and a startling wake-up call for parents who still think their own children are immune to the excesses and influences of today’s sexed up youth culture.” By showing some examples of outreach and education on these topics in school settings, viewers could infer that school districts should bring these types of experts to speak with their students. Viewers are most likely to conclude that limiting children’s access to commercial marketing, mainstream media, and social media would be best. According to the research presented in the film, we can infer that the solution lies with parents. Viewers are warned that children/teens are likely to discount parental guidance about sex if they feel judged by their parents. However, parents taking advice from this film likely find themselves torn between two key recommendations: How can they simultaneously police their children’s access to sexual media, while still being seen by their children as being nonjudgmental about sex?
With recommendations focused mainly on family units and less so on schools, the solutions fail to address the larger problems that would require sociocultural change. The film concludes without recommending a particular policy or set of policies that could put the brakes on this acceleration of unhealthy changes to youth culture. In the end, there is no resolution of the inherent tension between individual freedom and public good. As such, Sext Up Kids falls short of exemplifying the type of campaign which moral entrepreneurial theorists (e.g., Spector and Kitsuse 1977) have found to be effective. With our awareness raised, it is not clear how we can best organize for collective action and systemic change. The film misses an opportunity to address strategies for challenging the social institutions, media norms, and media/technology policies that it effectively presents as being at the root of the hypersexualization of children.