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(continued from here)
I believe the problem is that teenagers are oppressed, specifically that they are constructed as morally acceptable to harm, ideologically objectified so that they are viewed as incapable of experiencing harm/trauma (validly), and subjected to material conditions which constrain their autonomy and ability to fight back against sexual harassment while adults are granted a disproportionate ability to sexually harass teenagers, dodge consequences, and in fact materially benefit from oppressing and upholding violence against teenagers, including sexual violence.
The belief that teenagers are acceptable to subject to sexual consent violations is not just a message that comes from media; it is extremely common throughout every aspect of patriarchal cultures (not sure about “our” though, there are a lot of different countries in the world and not all are exactly the same/generalizable). Most of which is ignored because scapegoating has laser-focused on Media but nothing else because that would involve scrutiny for the private sphere (specifically the nuclear family which is the source of huge amts of csa), school/workplace irl culture, evangelical churches, and general capitalist complicity.
What does “oversexualize” mean? “Sexualizing too much”? What does “sexualize” here mean? Depicting as having sex? (Sex with adults or sex with peers?) Or just as people who have sexual thoughts, feelings, or attractions? Fictional teenager characters or real teenage actors or photographs or nonfictional media (i.e. live tv/news)? Is there supposed to be some scale of “less sexualization” which would get you to a point where you’re at a “correct” level of sexualizedness? What is determining this standard of “how much teenagers are ‘supposed’ to be sexualized”? What are the conditions of these teenagers IRL? How exactly does a media-viewer make the leap from “seeing sexualized teenager in media” all the way to “I should sexually harass teenagers” (or “it’s ok to sexually harass teenagers”)? Similar arguments have played out in feminist discourse wrt adults already—the common argument that women experience sexual harassment because of an “oversexualization of women in media” etc. It is an unhelpful framing that collapses several different things together and deems safe some of the most severe sources of misogyny/sexual harassment culture. The “sexual media is the problem” theory posits, generally, that sexual harassment of teenagers (or women) is motivated by a viewing of teenagers/women “as sexual,” and that this view can be directly downloaded into one’s head from media. This misses out on a key point—harassers viewing them as sexual objects, as beings whom they are entitled to use for sex without concern for their [the teenagers’/women’s] wellbeing because they have no autonomy. (Fictional) media can influence culture and shape culture and reinforce aspects of culture and reflect the state of culture but it cannot create an entire culture wholesale.
The critique these people are trying to touch on but miss is more about how media depictions of sexuality and teenagers often portray them as objects, i.e. “sex”/“sexuality”/“sexualization” is something always done to them, by others (esp. adults), and implied to exist only for the adult gaze and power imbalances coercion etc are framed as good/desirable/harmless (or at least authors try to, and claim in discussions of their fiction that they ideologically agree with the sexual abusers shown) (and a teenagers-oppressing-adults reverse is socially impossible). And, this occurs in conjunction with discouragement of depictions of teenage sexuality which run counter to patriarchal expectations/hegemony—queerness especially—and depictions of teenagers as agents/subjects in their own lives, and especially depictions of teenagers who don’t tolerate adultist bullshit (in general, not just wrt sexuality), and also framing the choice for a teenager to be (consensually) sexual/not sexual as theirs, not just something determined by (adult) cultural standards/expectations (hence why, for example, asexual representation especially asexual teens in media are extremely rare). But this isn’t an issue that can just be reduced to “sexualization is the problem.” The disproportionate prevalence of certain forms of sex, sexuality, sexual identity, sexual norms and idea(l)s and practices wrt teenagers depicted in media reflect the adultist patriarchal sexual abuse culture irl. And the disproportionate lack of certain forms of sexuality etc depicted in media reflect the adultist patriarchal culture of sexual control/regulation (which is also the sexual abuse culture) irl. And these can reinforce cultural notions that sexual harassment of teenagers is okay, and reinforce how difficult it is to go up against it/imagine alternatives/support alternatives, but that doesn’t mean media itself is The problem.
But, a lot of the media discourse seems to be, simply, “if an adult sees a sexual depiction of a teenager he’ll decide to sexually harass teenagers.” As in, “if someone sees a sexual depiction of a person, that someone will decide to sexually harass those people.” This is disturbingly similar to the view that if women dress “sexually” or “appear sexually attractive,” men will automatically want to sexually harass them. This also reminds me of the marginalization of the sex workers in the porn radfems crusade against as the sole cause of rape culture because “porn sexualizes women,” as if sex workers “cause” the disproportionate sexual assaults against them by virtue of being sexual (“you being raped is inevitable for you given so and so choices you’ve made/others like you have made”) which sucks and also misdirects from a more accurate view of rapists’ motivations. Likewise the blaming of teenagers being shown “wearing skimpy clothing” or whatever for “provoking” adults to sexually harass them/other teenagers is very yikes and wrong.
Adults, people in general, are capable of seeing a teenager on the screen or reading about a teenager in a book having a sexuality, experiencing sexual attraction, being “sexual,” or having sex without automatically making the leap that this sexuality is theirs [the observer’s] to own/have / that consent violations wrt sexuality are okay. Adults who believe sexually harassing teenagers is okay almost overwhelmingly already believe (at least to some extent) that it is okay even before they encounter whatever media is being scapegoated. Adults, and people in general, can also be capable of seeing a depiction of sexual abuse of teenagers which the creator considered non-abusive and which the creator intended as pro-[sexual abuse] propaganda without buying into it and agreeing with the creator. Likewise, media critique is good, but where there is reasonable doubt of the direct ideological intent/impact the issues that actually matter are what the creator/commentators says about the fiction/media directly, and whether or not the fiction/media was produced using actual exploitation/coercion/abuse of subjects—but then that’s still not a problem of “viewers mentally download the exact opinions of the creator of every work of media they encounter.”
A simpler standard of “amount of ‘sexualization’ that’s not ‘too much’” would simply be “no violating consent of real-life people, no forcing people to not have consensual sex that they want, no pressuring people to show certain aesthetics or portray themselves in certain ways that they do not want/aren’t okay with, fictional-only characters that’s not a concern already so write/draw what you want and don’t prevent others from writing/drawing what they want and other issues (such as usage of fiction as propaganda; artist/audience viewing a certain narrative as justification for problematic IRL morals) can be solved by better media literacy and political education (nor just formal).”
But, do you happen to have any ideas about how to solve the problem of youth (especially girls) being constantly sexually harassed online? /genq
- *and trans youth
- destroy IRL adult-supremacist institutions (nuclear family school capital state etc) which cause youth to suffer constantly and severely en masse and withhold knowledge/information/resources from youth which gives leverage to online adultists who promise the outside-withheld care/attention/relative “autonomy” (allowance) in exchange for sexual coercion/tolerating boundary violations
- youth (decentralized) education and empowerment offline wrt consent, boundaries, sexual politics, self-defense, how to stay safe and maximize your mental health experience online (not in the liberal way but like actually relevant info, like “interaction is not an obligation ever don’t feel bad about setting boundaries/blocking questionable people” or “Great Community Leaders are fallible and power tends to cover up harm” or “these are common manipulation tactics used by abusers” etc. and also combatting abuse of youth irl so that it’s easier to have a better time online and be under less threat
- education about the harms of bigotry and of platforming bigots (not just adult supremacy or misogyny, but also other intersecting issues like queerphobia, ableism, saneism, racism, etc. that contribute to the conditions which make up the sexual harassment problem); combatting bigotry and bigots offline and online (i.e. making it easier for people to call out bigotry/discuss anti-bigotry opinions without fear of backlash; making it harder for people to spread bigotry or engage in bigoted harassment without fear of backlash)
- this also includes paramisia because it is extremely common for antiparaphiliacs (esp. antimaps) (and also antishippers tbh) to sexually harass youth who are paraphiliacs, justified by paramisic beliefs.
- many sexual harassers of youth online also abuse and coercively control their victims over long periods of time. i am a huge fan of measures such as whisper networks, threatening bigots/harassers/abusers who are significant ongoing threats who will not stop otherwise, callouts, disassociation, cutting them off from positions of power or invitations to events, doxxing, physical violence, and more. community self-/mutual defense, help your friend/comrade get what they need so their harasser/stalker/abuser no longer has a hold over them. though most of these cases are more individual. (antifa protocols wrt online neonazis are a helpful model.)
- connecting with vulnerable members of your community who lack support networks. spreading the above info/ideological possibilities but also just helping people out and creating conditions in which it is easier for them to come out about sexual harassment/abuse if it happens. fighting against the conditions which create invisibility and disposability of victims/marginalized youth. working to reverse the balance in other ways too i.e. if bigots/harassers are running a smear campaign against them/leveling false accusations you make sure they aren’t the only voices talking about them running the only narrative that third parties have access to.
- widespread social push for platform moderators to enforce rules against sexual harassment of youth. not allowing it to continue unchecked, if that’s within their power. i.e. removing sexually harassing messages, banning bad actors instead of a “free speech absolutism” lax moderation stance. fighting the capitalist conditions which allow billionaires/corporations to purchase huge swaths of online public space (i.e. twitter) and enable huge amounts of abuse and harassment to run unchecked. decentralizing social media, creating alternative platforms (i.e. fediverse) that are more locally run; fallback networks/communities for groups of marginalized/socially stigmatized youth who are barred from normative online spaces (map communities are a good example—a respite from the constant bombardment of anti rhetoric and its damaging effects to the psyche and personal safety). helping marginalized youth leave bigoted, toxic, abusive, sexually violent communities they feel trapped in/obligated to (anti community is an obvious example, but also others like online TERF spaces, other rightwing spaces, ableist/saneist/anti-survivor/cringe-culturist communities, and more).
- attacking all adultists and adultism and violence against youth online, not just sexualized forms. an adult should not be able to make ageist comments about youth at all without being disagreed with/yelled at/cut off.
- pressuring people to deplatform things like abusive adults’ doxxes of teenage victims, or other content that should have remained private but has been taken out of containment as a form of violence—“revenge porn”/csam, personal details/messages, other things intended to humiliate/ostracize or violate privacy/consent/boundaries, and more. getting to a point where such adults face significant threats by sharing and are pressured to remove the content. also maybe having ppl who know how to (try to) bypass network limitations and forcibly remove the content for them for the (many) situations in which neither the harasser themself nor the platform will do it (though I know next to nothing about tech stuff, hacking, or similar and I know that’s a bit more extreme than other proposals so idk for now) (I definitely would not rely on waiting for the state to pass down laws/companies or webhosts or providers to enforce though, that leaves a lot open for chance)
- less directly impactful, but working to overturn the status quo of sexual harassment apologia and general adultism in the theoretical arena would also be nice
- basically what feminists say about defending adult women/trans ppl online from gendered sexual harassment, and what youth liberationists say about offline anti-abuse praxis, but combined
People often say that the problem is caused by the fact that our culture oversexualizes teenagers (especially teenage girls) in media etc. Do you think that’s true?No, not really.
I believe the problem is that teenagers are oppressed, specifically that they are constructed as morally acceptable to harm, ideologically objectified so that they are viewed as incapable of experiencing harm/trauma (validly), and subjected to material conditions which constrain their autonomy and ability to fight back against sexual harassment while adults are granted a disproportionate ability to sexually harass teenagers, dodge consequences, and in fact materially benefit from oppressing and upholding violence against teenagers, including sexual violence.
The belief that teenagers are acceptable to subject to sexual consent violations is not just a message that comes from media; it is extremely common throughout every aspect of patriarchal cultures (not sure about “our” though, there are a lot of different countries in the world and not all are exactly the same/generalizable). Most of which is ignored because scapegoating has laser-focused on Media but nothing else because that would involve scrutiny for the private sphere (specifically the nuclear family which is the source of huge amts of csa), school/workplace irl culture, evangelical churches, and general capitalist complicity.
What does “oversexualize” mean? “Sexualizing too much”? What does “sexualize” here mean? Depicting as having sex? (Sex with adults or sex with peers?) Or just as people who have sexual thoughts, feelings, or attractions? Fictional teenager characters or real teenage actors or photographs or nonfictional media (i.e. live tv/news)? Is there supposed to be some scale of “less sexualization” which would get you to a point where you’re at a “correct” level of sexualizedness? What is determining this standard of “how much teenagers are ‘supposed’ to be sexualized”? What are the conditions of these teenagers IRL? How exactly does a media-viewer make the leap from “seeing sexualized teenager in media” all the way to “I should sexually harass teenagers” (or “it’s ok to sexually harass teenagers”)? Similar arguments have played out in feminist discourse wrt adults already—the common argument that women experience sexual harassment because of an “oversexualization of women in media” etc. It is an unhelpful framing that collapses several different things together and deems safe some of the most severe sources of misogyny/sexual harassment culture. The “sexual media is the problem” theory posits, generally, that sexual harassment of teenagers (or women) is motivated by a viewing of teenagers/women “as sexual,” and that this view can be directly downloaded into one’s head from media. This misses out on a key point—harassers viewing them as sexual objects, as beings whom they are entitled to use for sex without concern for their [the teenagers’/women’s] wellbeing because they have no autonomy. (Fictional) media can influence culture and shape culture and reinforce aspects of culture and reflect the state of culture but it cannot create an entire culture wholesale.
The critique these people are trying to touch on but miss is more about how media depictions of sexuality and teenagers often portray them as objects, i.e. “sex”/“sexuality”/“sexualization” is something always done to them, by others (esp. adults), and implied to exist only for the adult gaze and power imbalances coercion etc are framed as good/desirable/harmless (or at least authors try to, and claim in discussions of their fiction that they ideologically agree with the sexual abusers shown) (and a teenagers-oppressing-adults reverse is socially impossible). And, this occurs in conjunction with discouragement of depictions of teenage sexuality which run counter to patriarchal expectations/hegemony—queerness especially—and depictions of teenagers as agents/subjects in their own lives, and especially depictions of teenagers who don’t tolerate adultist bullshit (in general, not just wrt sexuality), and also framing the choice for a teenager to be (consensually) sexual/not sexual as theirs, not just something determined by (adult) cultural standards/expectations (hence why, for example, asexual representation especially asexual teens in media are extremely rare). But this isn’t an issue that can just be reduced to “sexualization is the problem.” The disproportionate prevalence of certain forms of sex, sexuality, sexual identity, sexual norms and idea(l)s and practices wrt teenagers depicted in media reflect the adultist patriarchal sexual abuse culture irl. And the disproportionate lack of certain forms of sexuality etc depicted in media reflect the adultist patriarchal culture of sexual control/regulation (which is also the sexual abuse culture) irl. And these can reinforce cultural notions that sexual harassment of teenagers is okay, and reinforce how difficult it is to go up against it/imagine alternatives/support alternatives, but that doesn’t mean media itself is The problem.
But, a lot of the media discourse seems to be, simply, “if an adult sees a sexual depiction of a teenager he’ll decide to sexually harass teenagers.” As in, “if someone sees a sexual depiction of a person, that someone will decide to sexually harass those people.” This is disturbingly similar to the view that if women dress “sexually” or “appear sexually attractive,” men will automatically want to sexually harass them. This also reminds me of the marginalization of the sex workers in the porn radfems crusade against as the sole cause of rape culture because “porn sexualizes women,” as if sex workers “cause” the disproportionate sexual assaults against them by virtue of being sexual (“you being raped is inevitable for you given so and so choices you’ve made/others like you have made”) which sucks and also misdirects from a more accurate view of rapists’ motivations. Likewise the blaming of teenagers being shown “wearing skimpy clothing” or whatever for “provoking” adults to sexually harass them/other teenagers is very yikes and wrong.
Adults, people in general, are capable of seeing a teenager on the screen or reading about a teenager in a book having a sexuality, experiencing sexual attraction, being “sexual,” or having sex without automatically making the leap that this sexuality is theirs [the observer’s] to own/have / that consent violations wrt sexuality are okay. Adults who believe sexually harassing teenagers is okay almost overwhelmingly already believe (at least to some extent) that it is okay even before they encounter whatever media is being scapegoated. Adults, and people in general, can also be capable of seeing a depiction of sexual abuse of teenagers which the creator considered non-abusive and which the creator intended as pro-[sexual abuse] propaganda without buying into it and agreeing with the creator. Likewise, media critique is good, but where there is reasonable doubt of the direct ideological intent/impact the issues that actually matter are what the creator/commentators says about the fiction/media directly, and whether or not the fiction/media was produced using actual exploitation/coercion/abuse of subjects—but then that’s still not a problem of “viewers mentally download the exact opinions of the creator of every work of media they encounter.”
A simpler standard of “amount of ‘sexualization’ that’s not ‘too much’” would simply be “no violating consent of real-life people, no forcing people to not have consensual sex that they want, no pressuring people to show certain aesthetics or portray themselves in certain ways that they do not want/aren’t okay with, fictional-only characters that’s not a concern already so write/draw what you want and don’t prevent others from writing/drawing what they want and other issues (such as usage of fiction as propaganda; artist/audience viewing a certain narrative as justification for problematic IRL morals) can be solved by better media literacy and political education (nor just formal).”
