Don't think! I know just what you're sayin/I don't need your reasons/Don't tell me 'cause it hurts
If Audrey can do it, then I can certainly pretend to.
Caroline Overington. Walkley award winning journalist.
She reported on Emma Rush’s Corporate Paedophilia report when it came out last year and her blog sloshed back and forth with the salty sounds of people getting righteously outraged at either the report or each other (for getting outraged at the report). I may have even had a thing or two to say about it myself.
The report was one of those academic pieces that suggests trends and provides semiotic content analysis to draw conclusions about the path of the media and the possible outcomes. But in calling itself Corporate Paedophilia and including a bunch of dirty pictures that turned out to be nothing more than the examples discussed in the report, it set itself up for a big fat law suit. Which is where Carolineington came in today. She found a bunch of people, Phillip Adams: coiner of the phrase ‘corporate paedophilia’ included, to hum and ha and conclude that Rush was indeed a sex-mad feminist wowser. But, it is the Opinion, er, Features page – so one can pretty report what and how one wants.
Which is why blogs are popular…
So here’s my take:
As I mentioned above, the report doesn’t provide concrete scientific evidence that corporations + advertising = a rapid increase in grown men stuffing Target-clad 10-year-olds into their linen cupboards. It makes the statement that advertisements aimed at children increasingly have the children depicted in those ads performing behaviours that, when adults do them, mean sexual things.
Picture a grown woman, sitting on a rock at the beach. She’s wearing shorts, a loose singlet. She’s smiling slightly into the camera and leaning forward. A shoulder strap is sliding down. Sexual? Maybe. But you definitely looked down her top. How about a full-page magazine ad, again a woman, swirly top, tight jeans, hair brushed over her eyes, she’s laying on a couch, but most of page is taken up by her body. Her breasts and hips stretch her clothes in places that make you look. Hot, eh? If you’re into that kind of thing.
Now replace those grown women with 11-year-old girls. The sexiness is removed, but they are still there, on display. It’s a bit weird, yeah?
It’s only weird if the children are doing things and dressed in ways that if adults were to replace them, mean sexual things. A 9-year-old girl batting her eyelids to her friends and family is mucking around (or trying to get an ice-cream). A 9-year-old girl batting her eyelids to the adult photographer’s camera as instructed by the adult marketing manager of a national campaign for a teenage clothing brand has a different context.
Caroverington either doesn’t understand that, or (more likely) understands it all too well and ignores it in order to incite comfortable feelings of righteousness in a population that doesn’t really want to think about things too hard.
This generalisation can be summed up by Carolington’s summing up quote as provided by a guy who wrote a book called Why TV is Good for Kids. He is in the process of pooh-poohing any parent who succumbs to pester-power:
"… I don't buy it. I'm big into parental responsibility. I'm the adult in the house. If I don't want the kids to have something, I say no, you can't have it. If they say why, I say, because I said so."
Because I said so.
Don’t ask why, because you won’t get an explanation. That’s why people dislike the humanities so much: because we’re so bloody interested in explanations and theories that we won’t ever really come out with a big, healthy, masculine Because I Said So. The only answers we provide require more questions.
And that’s bad for a Howard-run Australia.*
*And we’re always finding a way to bash the Howard-run Australia.