Sexualisation of girls and the role of the mother
While media portrayals of women and girls as sexual objects are omnipresent and intrusive, we can blame too much on these public influences and forget the importance of what parents do. That seems to be the main message of a US study of girls aged 6 to 9 years.
Psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (its Calvinist namesake would have been pleased) showed 60 girls a series of paper doll pairs, one dressed in tight and revealing “sexy” clothes and the other wearing a trendy but covered-up, loose outfit, Jennifer Abassi reports on Live Science.
Presenting each pair, the researchers asked each girl to choose the doll that (a) looked like her, (b) looked how she wanted to look, (c) was the popular girl in school, and (d) she wanted to play with.
Across-the-board, girls chose the “sexy” doll most often. The results were significant in two categories: 68 percent of the girls said the doll looked how she wanted to look, and 72 percent said she was more popular than the non-sexy doll.
Popularity is clearly a key to this trend, with many 6- to 7-year-old girls, even, choosing the sexualized doll as their ideal self.
The researchers looked at variables including dance (as an influence on body image), media consumption, the mother’s example and mother’s religious beliefs. The mother seems to hold the key, for good or ill.
Thus, media consumption alone did not influence girls to prefer the sexy dolls, but those who watched a lot of TV and movies and also had mothers who reported self-objectifying tendencies, such as worrying about their clothes and appearances many times a day, were more likely to say that the sexy doll was popular.
However, mothers who reported often using TV and movies as teaching moments about bad behaviours and unrealistic scenarios were much less likely to have daughters who said they looked like the sexy doll. Which may explain an unexpected result:
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