Not for adults only

We need to help our children make informed decisions even as we look for ways to protect them from an overdose of sexualisation.

As 10-year-old Rajiv walks round the house singing, his mother stops, listens, and nearly has a fit as she listens to the words, “Come on rude boy, boy can you get it up?/Come here rude boy, boy is you big enough?” Forget the bad grammar, where has the child learnt such overtly sexual songs? She finds it is from Rihanna’s (the young Barbadian-American singer-model) video on Channel V. But that is not the only source of his sexual information and awareness.

From all that’s available as now-standard fare on TV, he can learn about all manner of sexual practices. From the widely-watched and very popular sitcom Friends, he can learn about partners of the same sex, sex on first dates, and how much fun watching porn is. As well as how some people make tapes of themselves having sex.

The same lessons can be learnt from a number of other shows. In How I Met Your Mother, most of the action centres around a pickup bar where one of the main characters spends every night looking for, and usually finding, a partner for a one-night stand. Oral sex is regularly mentioned and almost every episode features some kind of casual sex.

In Two and a Half Men, the talk of sex includes some practices so out of the loop that often mild references are censored out while extreme sexual practices are regularly mentioned and bondage or sadomasochistic practices are depicted. If our children grow up to think being tied to a bed could be an accepted sexual practice, we only have TV programmes like these to thank! But it is not just popular songs and TV programmes that (mis)inform our children about sex.

Many of our newspapers and magazines do their bit to sexualise children. Once they are old enough to read and old enough to understand, ‘information’ is rife, on ways to improve your love life, satisfy your partner, have better orgasms, and so on. More importantly, the social pages give an impression that being ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ makes a person more desirable and socially acceptable. Increasing numbers of our teenagers believe that as far as clothes go, less is more attractive. Dresses and makeup that would make our mothers reach for the shawl, dupatta and soap are now commonplace.

The volume of sexualised images and the harmful effects that come with it, is worrying both educationists and psychologists. There is ample evidence that sexualisation has negative effects on cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, and healthy sexual development. A report by the American Psychological Association (APA) believes it undermines teenagers’ confidence and can create a negative self-image leading to feelings of shame and anxiety. Also, a body of evidence now links sexualisation with several of the most common mental health problems in young women and girls: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.

So how can we deal with this sexualisation of our children? In many parts of India, society is in transition and  we have all sorts of different sexual morals and norms. So the primary duty rests with parents who can have the strongest influence. They can protect their children by communicating with them and supporting them to understand and react responsibly to the imagery and attitudes that are now an integral part of our lives, through various forms of the media.

Schools have a duty to teach healthy sexual practices regardless of moral implications. Media literacy and sexualisation topics in sex education are necessary, not to moralise about what path the child should or should not follow, but to help him/her understand the messages being sent out and the possible negative effects they could have.

Censorship is not the answer. The problem would be partially solved if our media was more responsible about the management of sexual content, and regulated more strictly (timings could be one way) shows with adult content. Advertising could ignore the fact that sex sells and tone down the sexual content of advertising aimed at young people.

However, in the end it is education that will help our children understand and cope with our sexualised society, and that is a big task. Unfortunately, many of those who teach or instruct are stuck in sexual time warps, and in many ways are far more ignorant of matters sexual than our teenagers. Training in media literacy and an awareness of different sexual attitudes is imperative. And not so that we can stop our children from doing what they want or feel compelled to do but so that they can make informed decisions that will make them, in the end, responsible, healthy, and happy.

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Abha Adams is a Delhi-based educationist