From previous discussions, isn't there a common theme of premature adultification for working class and/or Black girls? Like the defence of child prostitution somebody recently quoted ('the little madams know what they're doing and make a good living') as an argument that turned up in the then Hansard-recorded discussions about raising the age of consent in the late C19.
It reflects culturally rooted projections and fantasies of premature sexualisation and even hypersexualisation.
Of course, there are other views that would characterise mine as sex negative.
- produces a ‘scary futurology’ (Smith, 2010), with an overemphasis on protectionism, victimisation and objectification;
- neglects girls’ sexual agency, rights and pleasure (including how the eroticisation of innocence features in girls’ own sexual subjectification practices);
- renews enduring binaries of active, predatory male sexuality versus passive, non-agentic female sexuality (where girls’ sexuality is always risky/at risk);
- encourages either/or position-taking among stakeholders between sexual empowerment and pleasure versus sexual danger and protectionism;
- legitimises a heteronormative and linear developmental trajectory of ‘healthy’ female heterosexuality;
- operates as a white middle class panic over the desire for and loss of a raced and classed sexual innocence, and thus reproduces the othering of working class/racialised cultures as evidence of hyper-sexuality…
Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2013). Feminisms re-figuring ‘sexualisation’, sexuality and ‘the girl’. Feminist Theory, 14(3), 247-254. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700113499531