amijee no it is not prudish - I don't think that anyone is saying that this type of performance should be banned - it is more about is being pre-watershed on a family entertainment show.
<a class="break-all" href="http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100418065544/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/Sexualisation-of-young-people2835.pdf?view=Binary" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Quote from Linda Papadopoulos review into the sexualisation of young people.
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Advertising doesn?t just sell products; it sells aspirations and identities.
The proliferation and accessibility of advertising images and messages make it increasingly difficult to target them at the
appropriate audience. With the advent of mobile internet, it is almost impossible to
guarantee that messages are only being seen by the age group for which they are intended. There is no ?watershed? on the internet, and many adverts are sent indiscriminately to mobile phones and e-mail addresses. A child with a mobile phone literally has access to pornography in their pocket.
With proliferation and accessibility come
normalisation. From the café culture of lap dancing clubs, to push up bras for 8-year-olds, we?ve reached a point where it?s seemingly acceptable to use photographs of barely clad actresses and models, along with sexually explicit strap lines, on the covers of mainstream magazines and stock them alongside the comics in high street newsagents. High street stores sell video games where the player can beat up prostitutes with bats and steal from them in order to facilitate game progression.
The message is clear ? young girls should do whatever it takes to be desired. For boys the message is just as clear: be hyper-masculine and relate to girls as objects. It?s no surprise therefore that when researchers examine the content of young girls? web pages they find young teens are posting sexually explicit images of themselves on social networking sites, and self-regulating each other with sexist, derogatory and demeaning language.
As images that would have been found shocking just a few years ago flood the mainstream, so the boundaries get pushed back further. We?re seeing adverts that reference gang rape and adverts where women are reduced to dismembered body parts. In fact the influences of the iconic visual constructs of porn are contributing to the emergence of a caricature of what it means to be a woman.
Being beautiful,being attractive, being ?sexy? is no longer about individuality and the characteristics that make a person unique, it?s about ticking off items on a checklist: big breasts,big lips, fake tan, fake hair, fake nails ? and,of course, youth.
The notion that all young women who are socialised into believing that their worth lies in their sexuality and appearance should have the ?agency? to stand up to these images is naïve. This assumes that: firstly, all these messages are assimilated on a conscious level so can easily be challenged; secondly,that all young women are afforded the opportunity to moderate these messages through healthy parental and peer relationships; thirdly, that their own selfesteem is resilient enough to allow them
to question and stand up to prevailing norms; and finally, that their education has
afforded them the kind of media literacy
that allows them to ?filter out? unhealthy
messages.
The fact is that many young people don?t have these opportunities and, as such, are vulnerable to the messages both overt and covert that are propagated in the world around them. With a tendency to ?adultify?
children and ?infantilise? women, the lines where childhood ends and adulthood begins are becoming increasingly blurred. Girls who haven?t even developed secondary sex
characteristics are posed to look overtly
sexy, while adult women are posed to look submissive and child-like rather than empowered and in control. It?s no surprise therefore that for young female actors and musicians, taking their clothes off has become a rite of passage, a way of showing the world that they?re ?all grown up now?.
While boys are ?allowed? to enter adulthood without needing to advertise their sexual availability or desirability, they are nevertheless exposed to messages that reinforce the idea that they should be primarily motivated by sex and that male desire is something that cannot be controlled. This is having an impact both on boys? attitudes to their own bodies and on their attitudes to and behaviour towards girls.
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The review was commissioned by the last Government but has been shelved and the new review commissioned recently is much much narrower. 