Sexy Inc.: Our Children Under Influence. A Critical Look at the Phenomenon of Hypersexualization

by Sophie Bissonnete 2007
A National Film Board of Canada Production
DVD, 35 mins., col.
DVD Sales: $N/A; DVD rental: N/A
Distributor’s website: http://www.nfb.ca.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jonathanzilberg@gmail.com



Sexy Inc. is an important documentary film for everyone everywhere because it is about a pervasive “problem” in society that we cannot avoid. Whether one takes a liberal, conservative position or pro-sex feminist view of hypersexualization, commodification, misogyny, and pornography, it is very difficult not to be disturbed at the evidence this film presents about the effect that hypersexualization is having on young children.

Sexy Inc. details how the conjoined explosion of music video culture, the internet, and the commercial targeting of youth as sexual beings is having an intensely “noxious” effect on youth culture. The result of this complex cultural conjunction of media and markets with a single message, sex, has apparently been to greatly intensify the adoption of the most masochistic elements of popular culture and to encourage sexual exploration at ever younger ages. Though it is not explicitly addressed as it could be, being focused mainly on girls rather than boys, this is assumedly boosted by an early intimate knowledge of hard core pornography. While there is nothing especially new about these observations, and though academics typically valorize popular culture’s liberatory subversive potential, the film’s action oriented premise is based on the fact that psychologists have in the last decade come to notice marked shift in the age demographics of problems relating to sexuality. This position is indeed confirmed by the Report of the APA [American Psychological Association] Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2007). To that end, this film is part of a much larger project underway to protect Canadian children from the noxious effects of hypersexualization.

The film reveals how young girls in Canada, and by extension elsewhere, are being commoditized, objectified, and sexualized in more and more intense ways year by year. It does so very effectively through interviews with counselors, psychologists, and through a peer group of girls commenting upon examples of this sexualization in the media and the daily life of the young adult and child. The film is accompanied by an excellent facilitation guide designed to foster critical analysis of the phenomenon of hypersexualization as a way of coping with its negative effects. As a product intended for concerned professionals, educators and citizens and designed for assisting intervention, the film and the enclosed guide are essential acquisition materials for all public and university libraries. Significantly, the film itself is inappropriate for those under the age of 15.

To reiterate, Sexy Inc. is part of a larger project to stimulate communities to identify strategies that empower teachers, professionals, parents, and young adults to proactively cope with this growing problem. The essential point made here is that media and commercialism are effectively forcing children to become sexually aware and active in their preteen years when they are unable to cope with the pressures and the consequences. The explicit purpose of both the film and the guide is to foster an awareness of the phenomenon of hypersexualization and to assist them to actively question it so as to render the phenomenon less powerful and thus proactively mitigate its effects. The carefully conceived guide includes a brief reference list of valuable published resources as well as an annotated list of relevant internet sites providing brief descriptions of materials and programs underway in Canada to address this emerging social crisis. For these with more intellectual interests in media and society, rather than in practical engagement with social, psychological and health concerns, these materials in and of themselves highlight an expanding critical awareness of media effects in Canadian civil society. In this light, as a uniformly negative critique of the commoditization of sexuality in the media, Sexy Inc. will elicit all of the predictable range of discussions as regards Marxist critiques of consumption as opposed to a more celebratory view of the relentless progress of the dream factory and the way in which each new media form allows for a progressive intensification of resistance, identification and market potential.

The global relevance of Sexy Inc. is clear in a recent article “Girl Power” by Maggie Tiojakin in The Jakarta Post’s Weekender Magazine for July 2008. There a child psychologist notes the same demographic shift in mental health and other sexual and identity related problems in Indonesia. As she notes: “In the last four or five years, for instance, we have been dealing with depression, identity crisis, and sexuality in ways that in the early 1990’s were practically unheard of”. In that article, Jessica Huwae, editor of a local women’s magazine Media Perempuan, explains that this is ultimately due to the internet and changes in content in print media for young adults. In short, whether one is a young girl growing up in Jakarta or in Toronto, the access to media, the expansion of the media and the sexual content, and the power of the market are apparently having similar effects in very different cultures such that the issues confronted in this film are globally relevant.

The film is perhaps most interesting for the focus group discussions in which teenage girls respond and discuss the role of sexual imagery in music videos. It is at its most urgent in its presentation of youth counselors and psychologists describing the sudden drop in ages in the demographic incidence of social and medical problems connected to sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancies and related behavioral problems. In this, these professionals confirm the APA report that these demographics have dramatically shifted in the last six years in direct correlation to the hyper-sexualization of the media and the market.

As there is no point in evading the issue of pornography and the probable effects of internet pornography on young adults, it is perhaps instrumental to highlight one of the most revealing moments in the movie. In this scene, a psychological counselor is being interviewed about the issues facing children today in Canada. As an example of how far things have gone in recent years and how striking it has been for professionals, she cites the case of the 13 year old girl who asks her in a counseling session if she really must “take it in all three holes.” In all this, it is not so much access to pornography that is dealt with as the misogynistic ideology of the music video content that promotes behaviors and sexual exploration that was by and large unheard of a decade ago.

The movies greatest strength lies in its documentation of how a group of teenage girls have become critical of how artists such as Avril Lavyn have “sold out”. In this case, they initially idolized her as a role model as she was different and did not conform to the Britney Spear’s image but then came to despise her because of how she turned into her antithesis - Nelly Furtado. Though they are even more critical of the likes of 50 Cent, when one considers the phenomenal popularity of the highly sexualized Bratz Hollywood Dolly for very young girls and the intense sexual and aesthetic power of the clips provided from the show The Next Pussycat Doll, one wonders what chance peer group discussions by these unusually reflective teenage girls holds against the market and the media.

While an essential component of youth culture appears to involve the celebration and emulation of crudity and violence, the sexual objectification of girls and women, there is another side of the equation that is not sufficiently addressed in this film. Youth, certainly between the ages of 12 and 15 and even much younger are naturally inquisitive sexual beings. As for the desire to shop and be pretty, and for boys and girls to do what it takes to be “popular”, the power of the market and the media is assumedly insurmountable and accordingly this film and the associated anti-hypersexualization program will in all likelihood unfortunately have little substantial effect on society as a whole.

This film is especially relevant for undergraduate classes on gender, media and power. There it will provide an excellent context for debating the highly divisive positions over representation, pornography and sex positive feminism. Finally, I can think of no better generalized context for reflecting on Madonna’s current tour Sweet and Sticky. Considering that Madonna does not even let her own children watch what most conservatives consider a pornographic dance form damaging to children because of the explicit sexual references one wonders if she would not agree. Nevertheless, despite the obvious negative aspects of the hypersexualization of youth, one might well ask oneself is there not something overly politically correct, overly crudely Marxist and somehow even puritan about this film, Yet such criticism aside, Sexy Inc. will serve as a vital context and tool for encouraging young adults to be critical about that which they cannot be protected from - regardless of the variable degree of the prurience or empowering capacity of market driven sexuality.