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So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood

Thursday, March 22, 2012: 7:30 PM-9:00 PM
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Crystal Ballroom-Opening (The Charleston Marriott)
Children today are getting a very powerful and very damaging kind of sex education from the popular culture. Using many illustrations and examples of these sexual images and messages, this presentation will examine the harmful consequences of the sexualization of children and teenagers and suggest some strategies for change.
Scope of the Problem
  • Sexualization of children getting worse
  • Many seemingly adult models are really preteens
  • Sexualization is not sexuality

Examples of Sexualization

  • Dolls
  • TV shows
  • Fashion and clothing Halloween costumes
  • Advertising
  • Pornography
  • Celebrities
  • Magazines
  • Music
  • Video
  • games

Effects of Sexualization on Girls and Boys

Purpose of Sexualization 

What We Can Do to Combat Sexualization

While some people are fighting to keep sex education out of our schools or to limit it to abstinence only, children are getting a very powerful and very damaging kind of sex education from the popular culture.  Even very young children are routinely exposed to portrayals of sexual behavior devoid of emotions, attachment, or consequences.  Media messages about sex and sexuality often exploit women’s bodies and glamorize sexual violence.  Girls are encouraged to objectify themselves and to obsess about their sex appeal and appearance at absurdly young ages, while boys get the message that they should seek sex but avoid intimacy.

The average child today spends over six and a half hours a day engaged in some form of media and will see a minimum of two thousand sexual acts per year on television alone.  What used to be part of an adult, secret, mysterious world is now public, ordinary, everywhere.  Graphic sexualized imagery in advertising, television, movies, music, the Internet, video games, and more is used to capture children’s attention, all in the service of getting them to buy more and more – or to pressure their parents to buy things for them.  These images aren’t designed to sell them on sex, but to sell them on shopping.  However, they have many unintended consequences, ranging from sexist attitudes to high rates of teen pregnancy to sexual abuse. 

Using many illustrations and examples of these sexual images and messages, especially in advertising, this presentation will examine the harmful consequences of the sexualization of children and teenagers and suggest some strategies for change.

Primary Presenter:
Jean Kilbourne, EdD

Jean Kilbourne is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. She is the author of the award-winning book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. The prize-winning films based on her lectures include Killing Us Softly, Spin the Bottle, and Slim Hopes. She holds an honorary position as Senior Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women.



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