Cindy Sherman: Little girls play dress-up but I was always trying to be a monster instead of a fairy Cindy Sherman

Choose a Girl

It’s hard to criticize a girl for delving into social media, for instance, when her parents are constantly checking their own iPhones. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a therapist and educational consultant, has worked with school systems across the country for 30 years to develop curriculum that will increase social and emotional intelligence among boys and girls. She says that programs where girls are encouraged to create and then delve into their own projects are often successful. «There are so many images of girls, and they are always objectifying – it’s hard to make that go away,» Maya says. To start, girls can become media critics, says Professor Brown’s high school-age daughter, Maya Brown.

• To assess other-objectification, undergraduate men and women rated the extent to which the stimulus person engaged in mental activities (mind attribution) and completed a moral concern scale.
• “I’m a firm believer that girls and women of all ages should be able to wear whatever they want, but I’m not going to serve my daughter up on a platter,” says Keith, who still can’t believe she had to consider this issue as a kindergarten parent.
• Cassidy and Hurrell (1995) investigated the effect of a female victim’s clothing (i.e., provocative, conservative, no information) in an experiment with high school students.
• Some mothers of daughters who have scoured the Internet for alternatives, recommended to me blogs like Princess Free Zone and A Mighty Girl, as well as online stores offering alternative toys and clothes for girls.

Watch Little Kids React to a Realistic-Looking Barbie Alternative

The researchers questioned whether exposure to sexually objectifying television programs (77) and magazines (61) measured during 1 year would increase self-objectification and body surveillance the following year. Surprisingly, exposure to these media increased body surveillance only for men. One explanation for this sex difference might be that for women body surveillance is normative and thus not as susceptible to an external influence as it is for men. Later, Vandenbosch and Eggermont (2012), using objectification theory and social cognitive theory, examined the effect of viewing sexually objectifying fashion advertisements on adolescent girls in Belgium. Results demonstrated a direct effect of viewing sexually objectifying fashion magazines on internalization of beauty ideals and an indirect effect on self-objectification through the internalization of beauty ideals. Subsequently, researchers have shown interest in documenting the detrimental consequences for women to repeated exposure to these depictions.

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The use of objectification theory to explain and predict dress and violence seems to hold promise because sexual violence is a sexually objectifying experience. Evolutionary theory was cited most often by researchers studying dress as a cue to sexual information and the topic could benefit from an overarching theory to move it forward. In one study framed using objectification theory, undergraduate white women from the US Midwest viewed and rated well-known female Olympian athletes appearing in either provocative or sports attire (Gurung and Chrouser 2007). Lower ratings of capability (strength, determined, capable) as a function of the provocative dress manipulation and higher ratings of objectification (attractive, sexually experienced, desirable) traits were interpreted as evidence of sexual objectification. By this definition, provocative attire led to sexual objectification of the women athletes but the sports appropriate clothes did not. In addition, as compared to when wearing sports attire, when wearing provocative dress the athletes were rated less strong, less capable, less determined, less intelligent, less self-respecting, but more feminine.

Rather than parents investing their children with gender-specific clothing, sometimes children insist on wearing sex-typed clothing. Using cognitive theories of gender development, Halim et al. (2014) investigated appearance rigidity among young Caucasian children (ages 3–5 years). Appearance rigidity involves insisting on wearing dress items that are closely tied to one sex or avoiding dress items linked to the opposite sex. Few boys demonstrated appearance rigidity, but a majority of girls demonstrated appearance rigidity at least once. Rigidity was linked to children who indicated it was important to them to be a girl or boy (measured using items adapted from adult identity measures). Repeating the study with 4 year old children from ethnically diverse backgrounds, incidents of appearance rigidity were even higher as over half of both the girls and boys demonstrated it.

After all, the grown-ups still presumably hold the control and the checkbooks when kids are this age. At Bromwell Elementary School in Denver, kindergarten teacher Betsy Sturgess sent a letter home to parents in April asking them not to send their daughters to school in the popular low-rider pants. In 2011, Untitled #96 from Centrefolds sold at auction for $3.89m – making it the most expensive photograph ever at that time. She has also received countless awards including a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant”.

Seara Adair, a mother and influencer advocating for online safety, has spent several years independently studying Pinterest and other platforms. By seemingly letting “predatory” users run wild, she said, Pinterest has in her view fostered a culture of impunity. Some of those creating seemingly sexually suggestive boards filled with images of children are doing so using what appear to be their real names and photos in their Pinterest profiles.