Sexualisation. It’s become one of those words that people use without really examining what they mean by it. Whenever there’s talk of the media, or technology, or basically anything that has altered since the 1950s, commentators seem to gravitate back to the term “sexualisation” as something terrible that will happen to our female children if we don’t lock them in a tower and remove all ties to the outside world.

Laurie Penny has addressed this more brilliantly than I could ever hope to. Here’s a snippet of her article for the New Statesman:

‘…According to the ‘sexualisation’ logic, a young girl merely has to leaf through a contraband copy of Cosmopolitan or stumble on a Rhianna video on Youtube and wham, that’s it, sexualised. Ruined forever. Nothing to be done, and abuse and wanton, abject harlotry will surely follow.

“The honest facts of female sexual development in adolescence- especially the facts of girls’ desire – have sustained a long history of active censorship,” wrote Woolf in 1997. A decade-and-a-half later, it is still modish for politicians and public health officials to behave as if women and girls had no sexual agency whatsoever, and must instead be protected from the terrible disease of “sexualisation”, which young girls are assumed to catch like the common cold.

Apparently, we cannot cope, as a culture, with the idea that a young girl who experiences sexual desire might not be promiscuous, or wicked, or dangerous. With every technology of pleasure and knowledge at our fingertips, we are not a society that wants to know about female pleasure, or one that respects female sexual subjectivity.

And if young women are victimised – one in six children aged between 11 and 17 have experienced sexual abuse – we still seem to have a problem with placing blame where it belongs, with the abusers, whether they are strangers or members of their own family. No politician seems able to come forward and tell adult men to stop abusing young girls. The problem must, instead, lie with female sexuality itself, too much, or too young, or both. This week, national treasure Joanna Lumley took it upon herself to weigh in and tell young women to stop dressing “like trash” if they don’t want to get raped – an attitude that, despite the best efforts of sex-positive feminists, is becoming more and more common…’

Read the full article here.