by Patti Walker
I am no prude. If you want proof, ask anyone who has shared a backstage dressing room with me to explain what a fire drill is. As a dancer, I have a strong appreciation of the human form and a fairly positive view of my own body, flaws and all. Now, as the mother of a little girl, I feel a huge burden of responsibility toward helping her develop a positive self-image. However, I am often conflicted about just how to accomplish the hugely important and complex task of molding another human being’s relationship with her own body. Like when I’m changing her diaper…
EVE: Touch hiney?
MY INNER MONOLOGUE: Ew, gross! No! It’s covered in poop! But if I say ‘No, honey. Dirty.’ will she think I mean touching herself is dirty? And if I say ‘Sure, boo bear, just let mommy wipe the poopy off first.’ (which is what I end up saying, by the way) is she going to go to school tomorrow, lay down on the floor, throw her legs open, and say ‘TOUCH HINEY!’?
Exactly where is the line between healthy and freaky? Is it bad that the only way we can motivate our daughter toward the bathtub without a toddler tantrum is to announce “It’s time for the nekky dance!” I comply with her request to “kiss it” when she falls down and bumps her bottom because I’m afraid that saying “I’m not kissing your butt” will stigmatize her in some way.
So I kind of surprised myself the other day when a commercial on Nickelodeon made me run to the computer to figure out how to file a complaint. Evie and I were watching Dora the Explorer at 10 am on a Wednesday: a program and a time slot that only preschool-aged kids are watching. The commercial was for Old Navy Yoga Pants that supposedly give the wearer “instant yoga butt.” My immediate reaction was to shield my little girl from messages like these. I don’t want her caring what her butt looks like! And if you think, at not-quite-two years of age, she is too young to understand, then explain why she immediately turned to me and demanded cereal right after the next commercial (animated Cinnamon Toast Crunch characters licking and devouring each other… which, in print, I’ll admit, looks much worse than the “yoga butt” thing).
Now, after the Katie Perry/Elmo/“Hot and Cold” hoopla, where the video was pulled from the Sesame Street website after parents complained that Perry’s outfit was too revealing, I said “Oh, please! Like Eve hasn’t seen boobs before. In fact, she had a close personal relationship with mine for over a year.” So what if things got a little bouncy during the chase scene. The outfit seemed to mimic (and probably concealed more than) the dance outfits the children of those irate parents wear every year come recital time.
But the “yoga butt” commercial struck me totally differently. After first posting messages on the Nickelodeon and Old Navy websites and Facebook discussion boards (where I’m sure you can predict the response), I did what any self-respecting old school nerd would do: research. I went seeking fodder for a snappy comeback to all of the scoffers who said things like “Butts: everybody has one. Even toddlers” and “I doubt your toddler was even paying attention” and who were, in my humble opinion, clearly ill-informed and, let’s be honest, horrible parents.
I did find some validation in a book entitled “Advertising to Children on TV” published in 2005 that discussed children’s vulnerability to advertising because of their lack of knowledge about why commercials exist. Adults know the reason for the ad is to sell something and the source of the material is biased, but children do not. And researches have not really been able to pin down the age at which such understanding occurs (Gunter et al. 7).
Then I read an article published in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of Gender Studies entitled “Because looks can be deceiving: media alarm and the sexualisation [sic] of childhood - do we know what we mean?” that, as the title suggests, puts forward the idea that our attempts to protect our children from sexual content may be misguided. The author points to outrage in the media over “children adopting markers of sexuality” and asks “to what extent these concerns might be 'adult-centric', whereby adults assume that children share the same meaning they attribute to particular behaviours, and understand those behaviours on adult terms” (Thompson). This made me wonder if the Facebook scoffers had a point: that maybe Eve is not interpreting the messages as I do (that women need to make sure their butts look attractive so they can feel good about themselves) and furthermore, perhaps my attempts to control my daughter’s exposure to such messages has the potential of causing even greater harm than the messages themselves. To further quote the author,
Rarely is sexualised behaviour amongst girls understood as the harmless mimicking of behaviours associated with adults, decontextualised from adult meanings. We seem happy for little girls to play with kitchen sets, shopping trolleys and other apparently benign symbols of normalised adult womanhood. However, we seem to draw the line on play when it strays into behaviours that, to adults, represent sexuality. […]We rarely present sexuality to children as something positive, if at all. (Thompson)
So would the healthy expression of my daughter’s sexuality include asking for pants that give her “yoga butt?” I honestly don’t know. I don’t think I would react as my parents did when they caught me imitating a provocative dance I saw on MTV and shamed and embarrassed me in front of all of my cousins. But the idea that yoga butt is a requirement in order to feel good about oneself… those messages get into girls’ heads somehow and they come from somewhere. So how does a mother defend her daughter’s choice to evolve sexually, while simultaneously protecting her from the idea that she must?
Thompson, Kirrilly. "Because Looks Can Be Deceiving: Media Alarm and the
Sexualisation of Childhood - Do We Know What We Mean?" Journal of Gender
Studies 19.4 (December 2010): 395-400. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Jan.
2011.
Gunter, Barrie, Caroline Oates, and Mark Blades. Advertising to Children on TV:
Content, Impact, and Regulation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Print.
