Meaning Archive

If you haven’t heard yet, this. From what I’ve read in people’s commentary, the usual response can pretty much be summed up here: “Photo shoots requiring her, a 10-year-old-girl, to dress in full make-up, teetering heels and a dress with a cleavage cut to the waist across her pre-pubescent body deny Blondeau the right to be the child she is.”

And the image that’s being passed around in the media, this.

I’ve been wanting to write a nerdy blog post on this and I’ve been organizing my thoughts but am having a hard time gathering all of them into coherence. I’m gonna list a few things that I’ve been thinking about, c’mon and tell me what you think on any of these, or whatever that’s not included here:

1) On presentation:

• Is the presentation “sexy” or “sexual” or “sexualizing”? What’s the difference, if any?
• Is the presentation sexy/sexual/sexualizing or simply adult-y? I don’t actually find the image sexy/sexual/sexualizing aside from the arched ass, but adult-y, for sure. I mean, looking at the signifiers: stilettos, makeup, tiger rug, jewelry, the dress itself. I guess some can be construed as sexy/sexual/sexualizing, but say if you see this ad with the exact same everything except that the model is an adult, would it stick out OVERTLY as sexy/sexual/sexualizing? Yes, fashion ads are sexy/sexual/sexualizing in the ontological sense, but it also sets its own norm in DEGREES of sexy/sexual/sexualizing, and from the aesthetic POV, the degree here without the human figure, is pretty tame. My main point is, are we PROJECTING sexy/sexual/sexualizing interpretation onto where there is only adult-y presentation? Take “a cleavage cut to the waist across her pre-pubescent body” for example. What cleavage? Cleavage is defined by the presence of breasts, no? It’s similar to the idea of imaginary boundary, how people from nudist beaches put clothes back on once they get to the parking lot.

2) On ethics:

• Is it exploitative if she’s a) aware of what she’s doing & b) don’t think it’s exploitative? I know that totally sounds like pedophile logic but you can’t deny there’s a precocious sense of innocence that informs in the background the outrage. We acknowledge that the ubiquity of media and the media itself have sped up the growing up of kids. Is our sense of innocence projective and/or informed by the cultural atmosphere when we were kids or is there some notion of experiential innocence that is pretty uniform across different times and places and cultures? I read in another article where the author pretty much condemns Blondeau to a fucked up life re: therapy and whatnot when she looks back at these photos. Aren’t we prescribing psychological damage onto her by telling her that what she’s doing is un-innocent, something that may be culturally specific to our way of seeing, potentially onto a culture of a younger generation that seem to have different ideas of sex/sexuality? I’m thinking of culture of sexting, sex and sexual image as currency, etc. Not saying the culture in itself is healthy, but nevertheless it has its own value system that in a way we’re infringing on. It is partly objectively wrong, but also partly because it rubs raw against our aesthetic sense of “tastefulness.” tl;dr: who defines “exploitative?” What is the relationship between the arbiter of exploitation and victim?
• Consequentialist logic: Does an image or presentation like this create more pedophiles?

3) Medleys:

• You gotta give it to them, those fashion folks are more clever than I thought. Using kids as fashion models is a brilliant move to shut critics up about using anorexic models no? Kids in general are skinny or skinnier or skinny/skinnier outside of N. America. Who’s gonna raise the protest signs against kids being skinny?
• I can’t help but think that the outrage is very much an aesthetic response first and foremost. It flies patently in the face of how we would LIKE to perceive children, what we want children to be, to be like. Some might say that children want to be adults (which is true) and we create an environment for this kind of mimesis to take place (also true). But I think more central to this kind of “enabling” is not so much the children’s desire to be adults, but rather to acquire an identity for themselves. I think that at that age, without the necessary “life experience,” identity formation can only be reactive. Exactly into how we don’t want to perceive them. If history is cyclical, then they’re turning into our parents (if you’re around the same age as me), minus the ideology, or at least, an ideology and/or outlook we don’t want to stomach/acknowledge: sex as commodity. HIGH FIVE CONSUMER CULTURE!
• I’ll stake my position here before anyone’s like “Why ain’t you outraged are you pedobear?” This is pretty gross, though I’m more grossed out by the system and industry in place that think that this is a-okay and a culture that makes this possible, and the suspicion that the ad people did this strictly for media attention. But I want to examine my gut-feeling disgust and see if it has a leg to stand on logically, because the responses I’ve read thus far are of the Starr Jones variety.