Sex sells. In fact, it pretty much always has, hence prostitution often being described as “the world’s oldest profession”. In our Western culture, sex is everywhere. And whilst there are some positive aspects to it, we cannot afford to disregard the negative ones. As a matter of fact, it might turn out that the bad outweighs the good in this context.
I believe we can all agree that sexuality is not something children should not be exposed to. However, we as adults seem to forget that we’re the very gatekeepers of sexuality. In this way, by leaving the door open for children to be exposed to (hyper)sexual content, we’re responsible for the potential trauma they can experience in this respect. The people who set the trends are not children. They’re grown-ups, who can supposedly distinguish good from bad. Yet, we as grown-ups choose to promote and give our time and money to individuals who can potentially represent a threat to our children’s psychosexual development. So how did we get there? And how does Western mainstream culture and its promotions of hypersexuality affect young individuals?
Precisely 70 years ago, in 1951, the first human contraceptive pill was invented by Carl Djerassi in Mexico. Its use later got democratized following the 1960’s women’s rights movement. Alongside with the legalization of abortion, the pill helped women gain greater control over their own bodies and what they chose to do with it. In principle, that was good news, considering the lack of freedom women had lived with for centuries in the Western society. However, little did we know that through the democratization of female sexual liberation, we also were opening Pandora’s box. In that box, was a lot of good: better understanding of the female anatomy and its reproductive functions, a potentiality for better quality of sexual intercourses, less taboo around women’s health, more openness around female homosexuality, and overall broader sexual horizons for women, as well as for men. So far so good. But in that same box was also a lot of bad. This meant a potentiality for excessive self-indulgence, less accountability, and a tendency for comparing female sexuality to that of males’. By doing so, we slowly lost our original focus and the pre-existing tensions between men and women grew higher than ever before.
By comparing female sexuality to male sexuality in the attempt to democratize female sex-lead, we forgot to take into consideration our innate differences. Sexuality is in fact a very complex subject influenced by a myriad of different factors: hormones, bodily features, psychological differences, and more. Through this newly emerged sexual rivalry between men and women, also emerged a phenomenon of performative and competitive hypersexuality. Sexual liberation became associated with power, and power with sexual liberation.
In parallel, research have found that men tend, on average, to think more about sex than their female counterparts, as well as seeking it more. On the other hand, women’s libido has been observed to be more fluid than that of men. This for instance is explainable through the presence of a hormonal cycle in women (via menstruation) which causes sexual desires to be more sporadic and cyclic. Likewise, seen from biological perspective, men are able to procreate every day, while women can procreate only once every nine months. Through these differences, we can thus see how both genders differ when it comes to their biological composition and how those biological attributes express themselves in the everyday life.
Women and men can therefore not be taken as equal on a reproductive point of view, although both of them being fully able to reproduce and enjoy sexual intercourse. This being said, the debate is not over, and those afore mentioned details are rarely discussed. Instead, the focus has been shifted onto the association of sex and power.
In modern-day Western culture, this translates into hypersexuality being promoted and forced on young people’s psyche, through music, social media, and in the entertainment industry as a whole. Celebrities like Cardi B being given praises for songs like “WAP” only reinforces the concept of performative hypersexuality as a mean to gain money and fame. Female sexuality thus becomes a mainstream tool for success, which young females in the West often feel tempted and sometimes pressured to use. An example of that is American celebrity Danielle Bregoli, a.k.a. Bhad Bhabie, who five days after celebrating her eighteenth birthday, created an OnlyFans account, tweeting “got tired of u asking, so fuck it. But if imma do it, imma do it wild and crazy as fuck. Give it 2 weeks and we break the internet”.
Within the first six hours of her account being live, the teenage girl cashed in precisely $1,030,703.43, raising high concerns around the greater issue of sex work and how young females are lurked into it by men often twice their age.
The demand being there, the offer often follows. However, the demand was pretty much always there. Only, the offer did not always follow. The difference now lies in the normalization of hypersexuality and thus the democratization of female sex work, often undermining young women’s safety and health.
Oppositely, the female intellect is rather neglected and disregarded, ergo reinforcing the Western misogynistic stereotype around women not being made for intellectual fields. While it feels like we’ve come full circle, we cannot ignore the damage this does to younger generations, who already often struggle to construct their identity, adolescence being an already eventful and mentally challenging phase of life. Likewise, through the growing promotion of sexuality in mainstream media and the banalization of pornography, people’s arousal thresholds are being pushed further and further, thereby causing more and more men to suffer from erectile dysfunction as well as more and more people to resort to paraphilic behaviors in order to catch-up with their growing arousal thresholds.
Through their early exposure to sexuality, young people do not have the time to properly transition from one stage of their psychosexual development to another, causing more and more young people to engage in sexual activity very early and often with the wrong people. Through people’s sexual activity starting earlier and earlier, the threat of them being preyed on by older individuals is also increasing. Although pedophilia has pretty much always been around, the readiness for sex which more and more young people demonstrate contributes to an increase in the engagement of older adults in pedophilic behaviors and in them taking advantage of a lot of young people’s lack of experience.
The predominance of hypersexualization can also be observed through fashion, with trends set by celebrities, influencers, and big brands who most of the time prioritize money before children’s wellbeing. Influencers who are very popular amongst teens often represent a source of inspiration for young people whose wish often is to be accepted by their peers and be known as “the cool one”.
Already in 2015, Sue Jackson and Tiina Vares wrote in their study titled “‘Too many bad role models for us girls’: Girls, female pop celebritiesand ‘sexualisation’”, that: “In recent years the ‘sexualisation’ of pre-teen and younger girls has been a dominating presence in the media and popular press. Female celebrities’ hypersexual performances and styling, in particular, have been significantly implicated in claims about girls being launched into premature sexuality under the influence of their idols”. Through celebrities showing more and more skin, presenting as more and more sexual, the younger generation is more and more prone to imitate those behaviors and put themselves in situations where they can become preys to older and ill-intended individuals
While most of us are too busy criticizing, labeling, mislabeling, and hurting each other, we forget that our attention should be brought on the superordinate goal of protecting our younger brothers and sister, our children, who oftentimes imitate our behaviors rather than listen to what we say. We cannot avoid trauma in life. In fact, trauma can sometimes help us become stronger. Nevertheless, we all agree that overexposing our children to potentially traumatic content is not only unnecessary but also dangerous. So let’s keep that in mind, and let’s be more careful to what we promote, encourage, incite, and invest in.
Aude Calloch 