The infantilization of women…will we ever be free?
Disclaimer!!! This is just my opinion and so if I said something wrong, or untrue please let me know and we can discuss it together , just don’t hate. Then in this essay, I talk about sexism, pedophilia, sex and porn, child exploitation, and rape, plus most of this is based on heteronormativity, so if these make you uncomfortable please don’t read it. Also when I talk about women I also intend non-binary, female presenting individuals, and AFAB (assigned female at birth)That’s all, I hope someone will read this and like it, bye <3
The other day I was doing some research on the beauty standards for women and AFAB, what men are attracted to, and all of that jazz because I wanted to see where we are now, and after my snooping around on the internet I honestly had a pretty clear vision.
Big eyes, small nose, thin body, big chest, heart shaped face and the most requested age is 22. Then you need to be well groomed(shaved), have good hygiene, be docile, good at sex, and be submissive. We can already start to see a clear pattern; not only does society make women's life even more difficult with its unrealistic expectations, but they also are pretty much predatory.
I decided to start my research on one of the most used websites, Pornhub, so that I could better understand what people seek and are attracted to sexually. This way you can start to touch with your fingertips, an enormous iceberg full of sexism, pedophilia, racism, trauma responses, and so on. Starting with the most searched tags:
- Teens and I don’t even think it needs an explanation. People just go out of their way to find adult content that has a resemblance to children; the fact that the words ‘adult content’ and ‘children’ are even near each other says a lot. In these videos we can find very young or barely legal looking girls, with usually pigtails, long socks and childish but also extremely revealing clothes, doing sexual activities with big, masculine and old looking men…it’s really easy to understand how this phenomenon is purely paedophilic. This way people can fulfill their sick fantasies without actually consuming child pornography, so at least they are legally ok.
- Japanese, and about this tag there’s a lot to talk about: the school uniform; the racism; fetishization; etc… but here I wanna briefly discuss the Ahegao face. So that we are no the same page, the Ahego or O-face dates from the early 1990s, and it was the expression that a female actor made during an orgasm. But if we were to do more research, we can find out that, the first appearance of this face dates from 1980, in the comic ‘ Shoto Tubaki’, written by Suehiro Mauro. The origins of it come from the sick fantasies of said man, where he portrays a 12 y/o girl during a rape scene. Not only does that continue to push the dangerous stereotypes of submissive Japanese women, but it also dehumanizes, fetishizes, and exploits them.
- Hentai is the western way to say anime pornography and it derives from the Japanese word for ‘perverted’. It is becoming more and more popular in the porn world, some say because it isn’t a human-acted scene so we don’t need to worry about consent and morals, but is it the reason?
Personally,I don’t think so. In hentai the majority of them, if not all, there are numerous imagines of little girls with extremely big chests and butts; they look both mature and childish, so they can give the ‘sexy innocent’ look. Anime porn is also filled with violent and non-consensual scenes, continuing to spread the message that women are just objects for men’s pleasure. Obviously , this aren’t realistic characteristics to find on a children, so if they want to completely live their wet dreams, hentai is the only legal resource. We can also find a lot of porn content that contains kidnapping, rape, and incest, that said, we can understand that it is a pretty much recurring and popular problem.
So if we were to put all of this information together we would have a clear image. People want innocent ‘women’ because when we talk about innocence we also think about children, and children are naturally submissive, docile, and compliant subjects; Using and manipulating them is far easier than doing it on a grown adult; because men (take men really lightly)want a body to use without any inconvenient in their way.
Still talking about the representation of young girls in pop culture, one of the most famous and begin talked about, even after all these years, is the novel ‘Lolita’, written by Vladimir Nabokov. It talks about the relationship between a 12 years old girl named Dolores, and her step-dad Humber, that refers to her as Lolita, thus the title. This novel is also narrated by said step-dad, that sees nothing wrong in what he’s doing and doesn’t view Dolores as a victim, making the reader's experience even more disturbing.
We say that this book is one of the ‘best’ representations of young girls' over-sexualization and their exploitation because there are so many re-make of it on the internet. We have two films, where both actors were minors, musical adaptation, fashion sub-cultures, and signature items such as the heart sunglasses that Dolores wears and her red lipstick.
Just with these pieces of information, we can start to see how many people want to see and hear about stories like this, whether because they wanna educate themselves or because it’s their guilty pleasure it’s pretty much a mystery.
We can also find references to her in a couple of Lana Del Rey songs and her descriptions of her persona.
Lolita went from a disturbing to a sexual icon for young women, but not for the women perse, more for old men. Also, in the film adaptation, Dolores it’s an elegant and gracious figure, and all of her steps seem carefully planned so that she can always look desirable. While in the original book, Nabokov, highlights her tomboyish figure, the fact that she picks her nose and wedges, and repeatedly says that there’s nothing beautiful about her. In fact the meaning of this book was to make the public feel uncomfortable and disturbed, so that he could finally be memorable to them, since the rest of his novels were severely ignored. It was all Humber's sick views that made it that way, but still, that didn’t stop the directors of both films from making specific scenes, where she looked both ‘desirable’ and mature. Not only does this way the main point of the novel gets lost, the point is that we are talking about a normal child who wears and does normal children things, but they are also hinting that she asked for it and it was bound to happen. This way we can better understand how this industry works and the fact that they were trying to make us sympathize and understand the step-dad, whose a rapist and pedophile, in case it wasn’t clear enough, because who wouldn’t? (note the sarcasm)
But the image of seductive and ‘mature young children’, is extremely easy to find in general. So many underage actors are continuously begin called promiscuous and put in inappropriate situations.
From the Britney Spear… ‘Baby one more time’ music video, filmed when she was only 16 years old showing her dressed in a very school uniform that managed to show her bra; to Bjorn Andrésen who became famous at the age of 14 thanks to the film ‘Death in Venice’, representing the role of Tadzio.
The film director called him ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’, gaining international attention from the public and turning him into a sex symbol. Quoting the casting director, Margareta Kramtz : ‘I was standing next to Visconti(the film director) when this blonde guy turned up. It was plain to see Visconti’s body come to life. The boy was exquisitely beautiful, with a truly photogenic face. He was a real find. He was a boy with a special charisma. He seems frail. And that’s really beautiful in a film. You need to be very careful in dealing with children like that’. Or the infamous photoshoots for magazines, even really famous one like Vogue, capturing imagines of women in certain poses that want to resemble innocent looks, usually paired with a childish item; whether it’s a teddy bears or strings and bows in the hair, while still, being logically severely underdressed.
At the start, I also mentioned how men usually want a shaved woman that has good hygiene, with this we can briefly mention the body hair debate.
Every day people go out of their way to shave, wax, and put an extreme amount of creams on their skin so that they can preserve their young looks, just to have to go through the same process after a couple of weeks, spending so much money and time in something that maybe they don’t really wanna do. If we reflect on this, we will notice that society makes women and AFAB, embrace false womanhood. Because we know that once we start to enter it, hairs start to grow, mature features start to appear, and overall we stop being children; what they want us to embrace is in fact girlhood: Flawless skin, no stretch marks, a supposedly thin body, and a childlike personality. At the same time, we have also to be careful and show only selected parts of the grown woman's body; by that, I mean boobs and butt, then, we have to show them off. If we pay even a minimum of attention, we would also notice that all of these rules don’t apply to men and AMAB. They are in fact, always praised and complimented for their mature, ‘silver fox’ looks.
‘The association of femininity with docility and dependence relays the infantilization of women and the hair removal plays on the conception of women as childish and/or immature’
Travisha Sood on ‘verdict’
That said, we can see how gender roles play the biggest role I would dare to say in this debate; because if men/AMAB can have bushes, furs, and insects on their bodies overall, nobody would bat an eye, but if women/AFAB tried to have body hair, a bigger body, strong personality, and different style, society would call them men wannabes, because these are traits that only men can have, or lesbians, because lesbians aren’t for men, and so they aren’t relevant (if not for the fetishization obviously).
I think that now we can understand we aren’t liked because we do not resemble young girls, and so we aren’t naive enough to be used as just a body. Overall, saying that the society that we live in profits on children’s bodies and vulnerability it’s not enough. Infantilising ourselves for public pleasure( aegyo in K-pop from grown adults, the questionable expression on social media, participating in age-play during sexual interchange) only feeds into it, even more, so please, stop.
But has it always had a pedophilic end to it? Obviously not; to explain it better let me re-introduce the patriarchy and its beliefs that men are the only ones that can, and hold the power. So it’s also a sexist ideology used to show that women are simply not mature enough to do basically anything. For example, hugging a woman while shaking hands with a man, giving them nicknames even though you just met each other, explaining a topic in an overly sweet voice if the disadvantaged gender asks for help; from a psychological standpoint, treating someone like a toddler set dominance because it strips them of their autonomy and authority, objectifying them with its unfair power dynamics. So men that want to continue the stereotypical dynamic between genders, whether it’s purposely or not, tend to baby women.
To wrap it all up, we can understand that the infantilization of women, is used both to assert dominance in dynamics(not only used towards women and AFAB, but to all the other minorities), feeding into sexist, patriarchal, racist deas, and so gender stereotypes; and to feed into the pedophilic ideas and dreams of really sick people. By saying this I can conclude my essay, I really hope it was interesting, these were all of my sources: The base for my entire essay, https://study.com/learn/lesson/infantilization-of-women.html Article about hentai https://www.covenanteyes.com/2015/09/04/3-reasons-anime-porn-is-bad-for-you/ Article about the ahegao face https://animemotivation.com/the-history-of-ahegao-face-racism-asians/ Briefly video about the romanticization of Lolita https://youtu.be/G1gOhewhjbw Britney Spears music video https://youtu.be/C-u5WLJ9Yk4 Mentioned article on infantilized women https://www.theverdictonline.org/post/the-infantilization-of-women-in-mainstream-media-and-society Article about the infantilization of femininity https://thewaynestater.com/21922/opinion/the-infantilization-of-femininity/
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