There is a disturbing trend among parents that has been permeating popular culture for a couple of decades now: the objectification of young children. One need only witness the horrors that are toddler beauty pageants (and the reality TV shows, books, and movies that spawned from such) to know what I mean. Girls too young to even grasp basic arithmetic are gussied up, given dental veneers, bikinis, enough makeup to give Tammy Faye pause, hairstyles to rival the stature of any found in small-town Texas, and paraded around like tiny objectified dolls for the aesthetic enjoyment of the creepy old men and women who judge the degree to which these 4–6 year-old children successfully emulate adult sexiness.
Increasingly, this behavior has become a mainstream oddity that most sensible Americans are morbidly fascinated by, but publicly dismiss with a tsk-tsk and solemn head shake while secretly DVRing the latest episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras." Every now and then, someone will take a very serious stand against the objectification of 4 year-old girls, and the media will dutifully report on it, but the mock furor will quickly dissipate and the pageant continue.
Not only are these bizarre rituals and behaviors accepted and tacitly encouraged by American society, they also expose a hypocrisy: It is acceptable—nay, almost expected—for little girls to sculpt themselves in the image of sexually objectified adult women, only so far as they conform to the hetero-normative gender roles society assigns to all children. Should a little boy want to put on a dress or play house or prefer My Little Pony to G.I. Joe, he is immediately corrected and told to "man up." And heavens forbid that little boy should reveal a crush on another boy.
We are a voyeuristic society that simultaneously shuns and obsesses over sex. It's made us a rather screwed up bunch with a mastery of cognitively disconnecting our loathing of sex from our innate obsession with it. You know what it's gotten us? We accept truly aberrant behaviors such as encouraging little girls to remake themselves as tiny sex goddesses while rejecting and demonizing the perfectly natural state of being a little gay child with same-gender affections.
Somehow, a little boy's crush on a little girl, or a little girl's crush on a little boy is acceptable—even encouraged and nurtured as a rite of childhood. Yet, when a little boy shows affection for a member of his gender, people get squeamish. Many adults in this instance seem to suddenly and completely lose the ability to view childhood crushes as innocent emotional attachments based in love, and view same-gender crushes through their own lens of prejudice, colored by the ick factor that taints their view of adult gay people. For some reason, many people cannot think about gay people without simultaneously grossing themselves out by imagining what we do in private with each other's privates. Which goes to the heart of the struggle for equality: society can't get past the sex in homosexual. If you remove gender and sex from love, there is no distinguishable difference between the relationships enjoyed by Bob and Mary, Bob and Bob, or Mary and Mary. But we can't seem to help obsessing over everyone else's sex lives. Anything that differs from our own hard-wired sexual behaviors is viewed with suspicion, disgust, or outright loathing.
Guess what?
All heterosexual women were once little straight girls who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Justin Bieber.
All heterosexual men were once little straight boys who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Emma Watson.
All homosexual men were once little gay boys who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Blaine Anderson.
All homosexual women were once little gay girls who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Zooey Deschanel.
All too often, a little boy who has a same-gender crush is dismissed as being too young to know what he is talking about because we conflate a same-gender crush with sexual attraction, while at the same time a little girl is encouraged to make herself sexy so she'll get the boy she's crushing on. In both instances, we're assigning sexual attraction where it isn't warranted and can actually cause harm. The little girl is being encouraged to have such a lassez-faire attitude toward sex that it will become destructive when her sexual feelings awaken later in life and the little boy with the gay crush will become confused and conflicted when his emotional attachments are eventually joined by sexual attraction at the onset of adolescence. I know because I was that little boy.
Though too young at the time to know what gay was, I was once a little boy who, like the young son of blogger and Twitter friend Amelia, had a crush on a boy on TV. Unlike Amelia's brave little boy, however, I had inferred enough about the evils of homosexuality from parents and family members to internalize their homophobia unconsciously, and thus knew on a visceral level to keep those feelings secret. The only exposure I had to gay people in the 1980s were the hushed and condemning whispers about one of my mother's cousins who until AIDS outed him, had lived a deeply closeted and duplicitous life.
Cute boys being the object of my affection felt as natural as my affection for my parents, but somehow I knew I was alone in feeling that way. I was 5 and too young to even know what sex was, let alone think about actually doing it with anyone. What I felt for the boy on TV was a romantic love, the kind of oversimplified and exalted love every movie Disney ever made portrayed to its young audiences. The only problem? I was supposed to be the prince but I felt like the princess. In 1983, there were no princes like Blaine and Kurt with which I could identify. Hell, even "Will and Grace" was still 15 years away. So I hid my crush on "You Can't Do That On Television's" Alistair—and every boy crush that followed—and blissfully played with My Little Ponies and G.I. Joes and Star Wars toys.
Though, really, Mom, the My Little Pony obsession should have been your first clue.
That, and the Cabbage Patch Doll. The female Cabbage Patch Doll.
Huh. My Little Ponies. Cabbage Patch Dolls. G.I. Joe and Star Wars. Never really thought about it before now, but obviously my mother was more interested in making her little boy happy than worrying much about adhering too stringently to gender roles. In retrospect, I have to wonder if my mother wouldn't have been too dissimilar from Amelia had she not grown up in a time and region which taught her hate and fear rather than acceptance and love for the gayness inherent in her precious little boy.
Maybe when we as a society stop focusing on the objects of these feelings of love and instead focus on just nurturing and encouraging love itself, maybe then we'll stop the cycle of objectification in all its ugly forms.
Increasingly, this behavior has become a mainstream oddity that most sensible Americans are morbidly fascinated by, but publicly dismiss with a tsk-tsk and solemn head shake while secretly DVRing the latest episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras." Every now and then, someone will take a very serious stand against the objectification of 4 year-old girls, and the media will dutifully report on it, but the mock furor will quickly dissipate and the pageant continue.
Not only are these bizarre rituals and behaviors accepted and tacitly encouraged by American society, they also expose a hypocrisy: It is acceptable—nay, almost expected—for little girls to sculpt themselves in the image of sexually objectified adult women, only so far as they conform to the hetero-normative gender roles society assigns to all children. Should a little boy want to put on a dress or play house or prefer My Little Pony to G.I. Joe, he is immediately corrected and told to "man up." And heavens forbid that little boy should reveal a crush on another boy.
We are a voyeuristic society that simultaneously shuns and obsesses over sex. It's made us a rather screwed up bunch with a mastery of cognitively disconnecting our loathing of sex from our innate obsession with it. You know what it's gotten us? We accept truly aberrant behaviors such as encouraging little girls to remake themselves as tiny sex goddesses while rejecting and demonizing the perfectly natural state of being a little gay child with same-gender affections.
Somehow, a little boy's crush on a little girl, or a little girl's crush on a little boy is acceptable—even encouraged and nurtured as a rite of childhood. Yet, when a little boy shows affection for a member of his gender, people get squeamish. Many adults in this instance seem to suddenly and completely lose the ability to view childhood crushes as innocent emotional attachments based in love, and view same-gender crushes through their own lens of prejudice, colored by the ick factor that taints their view of adult gay people. For some reason, many people cannot think about gay people without simultaneously grossing themselves out by imagining what we do in private with each other's privates. Which goes to the heart of the struggle for equality: society can't get past the sex in homosexual. If you remove gender and sex from love, there is no distinguishable difference between the relationships enjoyed by Bob and Mary, Bob and Bob, or Mary and Mary. But we can't seem to help obsessing over everyone else's sex lives. Anything that differs from our own hard-wired sexual behaviors is viewed with suspicion, disgust, or outright loathing.
Guess what?
All heterosexual women were once little straight girls who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Justin Bieber.
All heterosexual men were once little straight boys who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Emma Watson.
All homosexual men were once little gay boys who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Blaine Anderson.
All homosexual women were once little gay girls who crushed on and dreamed of meeting and falling in love with their generation's Zooey Deschanel.
All too often, a little boy who has a same-gender crush is dismissed as being too young to know what he is talking about because we conflate a same-gender crush with sexual attraction, while at the same time a little girl is encouraged to make herself sexy so she'll get the boy she's crushing on. In both instances, we're assigning sexual attraction where it isn't warranted and can actually cause harm. The little girl is being encouraged to have such a lassez-faire attitude toward sex that it will become destructive when her sexual feelings awaken later in life and the little boy with the gay crush will become confused and conflicted when his emotional attachments are eventually joined by sexual attraction at the onset of adolescence. I know because I was that little boy.
Though too young at the time to know what gay was, I was once a little boy who, like the young son of blogger and Twitter friend Amelia, had a crush on a boy on TV. Unlike Amelia's brave little boy, however, I had inferred enough about the evils of homosexuality from parents and family members to internalize their homophobia unconsciously, and thus knew on a visceral level to keep those feelings secret. The only exposure I had to gay people in the 1980s were the hushed and condemning whispers about one of my mother's cousins who until AIDS outed him, had lived a deeply closeted and duplicitous life.
Cute boys being the object of my affection felt as natural as my affection for my parents, but somehow I knew I was alone in feeling that way. I was 5 and too young to even know what sex was, let alone think about actually doing it with anyone. What I felt for the boy on TV was a romantic love, the kind of oversimplified and exalted love every movie Disney ever made portrayed to its young audiences. The only problem? I was supposed to be the prince but I felt like the princess. In 1983, there were no princes like Blaine and Kurt with which I could identify. Hell, even "Will and Grace" was still 15 years away. So I hid my crush on "You Can't Do That On Television's" Alistair—and every boy crush that followed—and blissfully played with My Little Ponies and G.I. Joes and Star Wars toys.
Though, really, Mom, the My Little Pony obsession should have been your first clue.
That, and the Cabbage Patch Doll. The female Cabbage Patch Doll.
Huh. My Little Ponies. Cabbage Patch Dolls. G.I. Joe and Star Wars. Never really thought about it before now, but obviously my mother was more interested in making her little boy happy than worrying much about adhering too stringently to gender roles. In retrospect, I have to wonder if my mother wouldn't have been too dissimilar from Amelia had she not grown up in a time and region which taught her hate and fear rather than acceptance and love for the gayness inherent in her precious little boy.
Maybe when we as a society stop focusing on the objects of these feelings of love and instead focus on just nurturing and encouraging love itself, maybe then we'll stop the cycle of objectification in all its ugly forms.
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