#i mean this still happened in the past tho#brooke shields comes to mind#still its important
Yeah. I think there’s an argument to be made about social media sharpening an issue that already existed, but I think that you could say that the pics of Miley, Selena, and Lindsay looking so young also had to do with the fact that they were being branded as kid-friendly teeny-boppers at the time. Millie is in a show that’s popular with kids but also very [popular with adults. Her parents–according to online “industry rumors”–apparently want her to be seen as The Next Great Ingenue. Ingenues have a really unfortunate history of being sexualized, in part I think because of the fact that when you’re sexualized at a younger age, you get more “important” roles. You’re not a teeny-bopper, you’re a Young Woman.
(For that matter, Miley was photographed topless with only a blanket covering her breasts and her back to the camera when she was 15. And plenty of people have made arguments about whether or not the audience is wrong for reading that as sexual, but as someone with an art history degree…. you’re not wrong for reading that as sexual and fucking inappropriate.)
Brooke Shields, age 15 in her “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” ad. Which, like… if you somehow missed it, is an ad that wants you to think of the fact that this child isn’t wearing underwear beneath her jeans. So. I mean, it should be noted that Brooke had a pretty notorious stage mom who was totally okay with and even encouraged the sexualization of her teen daughter–but everyone was apparently okay with Brooke at this age being in Blue Lagoon, where she had (pretty tame, but very obvious) sex scenes and was basically naked for a lot of the movie with her hair glued to her boobs to keep her nipples from showing. She was even younger when she was in Pretty Baby–12 and in nude scenes! People tend to excuse the sexualization of children when it’s in pieces “condemning” that same thing, but Brooke is made up to look very purposefully erotically Lolita in that movie, so. And Blue Lagoon was like two years after that and it totally celebrates Brooke’s sexuality.
There are subtler examples, too. Keira Knightley was around 17 when Love, Actually was filmed and as much as I love that movie it’s pretty odd that Keira–because she looked older–was playing a new bride who is very much presented as an object of desire in the movie. I wouldn’t say that there is much to be said in terms of the role being sexual, but it’s one of those things where you’re like… hmm. Keira Knightley, at such a young age, could be presented as an object of male romantic longing and we’d buy it because she looked “old for her age”.
At 12, Jodie Foster played a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, and if you look at her in that film… It’s not a question. You’re supposed to see her as appealing, if in a grotesque way. And that’s the thing–child prostitutes do exist and it would perhaps be disingenuous to not portray them in media. But you don’t have to cast actual 12 year olds as child prostitutes, especially when they’ll be playing with material that they really aren’t ready to process. And you don’t have to portray child prostitutes as ACTUALLY SEXY and for that matter YOU FUCKING SHOULDN’T.
But a lot of these examples (including the ones today) get passes because they’re Tasteful, or in the Service of Art. And that’s been around since… visual media began, basically. Things that we normally would find abhorrent, including the sexualization of children, become cool and groovy as long as we can brush them off as works of art. And a lot of parents of stars can brush them off as long as they’re in the service of their kids’ careers. I mean, the Miley photo was taken while her dad was there. Brooke and Jodie’s moms were not only down with their young daughters being portrayed as CHILD PROSTITUTES, they encouraged it. Jodie’s mom justified it by saying that she didn’t want her daughter to be a child actress forever. So she explicitly pushed her into “adult” roles when she was fucking twelve. Chloe Grace Moretz also recreated that look for Harper’s Bazaar when she was around 14.
The sexualization of young stars (and not just female stars, as you can easily discover by looking at how people discuss Finn Wolfhard) has always been a problem. Social media just makes it easier for people to discover.
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