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Published in the Australian Literary Review, July 2008. Copyright Rachel Hills 2008.

FROM the media debate over the sexualisation of children, to the Sex and the City inspired relationship columns in newspapers and magazines, to the contemplations of “raunch culture” that line bookshops, to essays such as this, meditations on sex are all around us, most of them written by and about women.

We all know sex sells, but it’s simplistic to assume that’s the only reason people write about it. Sex catches our attention and holds it because it’s at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Rather than a way of avoiding big ideas, as often as not, sex is the entry point used to talk about them, and the books under review are no exception. Each considers the intersection of sex with popular culture and its impact on different social demographics: children (Consuming Innocence), teenagers (Prude) and women (Princesses and Pornstars).

None is about sex per se, not even The Porn Report, which is the only one of the four to engage with explicit erotic material (Princesses and Pornstars also glances at it). In fact, most of the time, the actual acts of sex is peripheral to the discussion. This may seem strange at first, but it’s symptomatic of the extent to which media images of sexualised culture — skimpy clothes, teen-oriented television shows, C-grade celebrities’ genitalia — and even that “sexualised culture” itself, have been divorced from sex.

In Prude, Carol Platt Liebau quotes from fashion industry trade journal Women’s Wear Daily: “Millennials (those born between 1978 and 1995) can’t remember a time when strong sexual imagery and messages weren’t widely available, or were considered controversial.”

This can be taken a step further: often, those short shorts, pouty MySpace photoshoots and suggestive song lyrics are barely construed as sexual at all to the young people creating or consuming them. As a teenager in the 1990s, it took me three years to figure out where the oral sex reference was in Alanis Morissette’s song You Oughta Know. The miniskirts I wore on weekends weren’t intended to provoke the men I passed on the street, but to emulate the outfits I’d seen Cameron Diaz wearing in Dolly.

Karen Brooks, a University of Queensland media studies academic and columnist for the Courier-Mail newspaper, gets this. Consuming Innocence is part social analysis, part practical advice designed to help parents navigate their children’s relationship with media and popular culture. Using as a starting point concerns about “age compression” – or children getting older younger – Brooks covers the gamut of children’s culture from TV and toys to social networking websites and, of course, the “celebrification” and sexualisation of children.

Brooks believes that when adults lament the erosion of childhood, they’re not worried about pedophiles (“… they’ll be around no matter how we dress our kids _ remember, they sexualise them regardless”) or literal sexual behaviour. As she argues:

while young children rarely associate the word “sexy” with the sexual act, they nonetheless link it to attitudes and perceptions that are important in their clique-ridden world.

To illustrate, Brooks quotes 11-year-old Jessica, who defines sexy as “pretty, hot and popular” — or, whittled down to its emotional essence, someone who is likeable and well-liked. To want to be liked is human. The issue is that the message children are getting is that to be liked they need to look and behave a certain way; this might involve purchasing thong underwear, visiting the beauty salon (actor Kate Beckinsale’s daughter has been getting facials since she was seven, Brooks writes) and owning the “right” clothes and toys.

That this set of behaviours – toys aside, perhaps – happens to coincide with what is sexy is only because the cultural codes for what is sexy and for what is socially powerful have so closely merged in contemporary advertising and marketing. (As Australian filmmaker Pria Viswalingam put it in the documentary series Decadence, which he produced and presented in 2006, “Sex has been hijacked from the bedroom and made to sell everything to every man and his dog. It’s the great prostitution of intimacy.”)

The result is that we have increasingly little commercial-free space in which to figure out who we are. This is the real concern, Brooks argues, that adults are expressing when they worry that children are growing up too fast. Sexualisation here is not about sex, but about commodification. Brooks isn’t wholly negative about pop culture’s influence on children. Bratz dolls, for example _ the 21st-century usurpers of Barbie _ espouse sassy, empowered messages, even as they urge children to consume and act, well, bratty. On TV, shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, The OC and Veronica Mars “portray the complex reasons underpinning human actions (revealing) that good people can do bad things and bad people can not only be redeemed, but some even have honourable intentions”.

And although Brooks is concerned about the impact of advertising on children too young to understand it as anything other than an information source, Consuming Innocence does not depict children as cultural dupes: one eight-year-old, responding to a teacher’s complaint that the Bratz dolls can’t spell, protests: “That’s just a marketing strategy!”

Brooks believes the best way adults can intercept the influence of popular culture on children is to engage with it themselves: “Make a point of getting to know the people your kids meet on TV Street,” she urges. “Think about what values popular culture influences are reinforcing or undermining and be supportive or critical of them in ways your kids understand. Laugh about what’s being shown; mock it if necessary. Reinforce that it’s who you are and not what you look like or have that counts.”

Liebau, a conservative American lawyer and social commentator, also promotes parents’ engagement with popular culture, but for different reasons: studies show that daughters of traditional parents are less likely to engage in sexual activity if sex and TV are discussed in the family home.

Liebau’s chief concern in Prude is that morality has been taken out of sex. “Too often, the sex lives of young girls are seen as a matter exclusively for the young girls themselves,” she writes. Teen sex and relationship advice online or in magazines offer the mechanical facts without judgment, “virtually never [making] determinations about the ethical, moral or religious aspects of teen sex”.

Prude portrays a culture saturated in sexual references. It opens with a fictional day-in-the-life of 14-year-old “Jennifer”, complete with miniskirts, fellatio rumours and a used condom discovered in the school hall. Liebau suggests this scenario is not sensationalist: one journalist who shadowed a 12-year-old girl estimated she had been exposed to 280 sexy images in the course of a day. Elsewhere, we read about rainbow parties (in which girls wearing different shades of lipstick perform oral sex on a group of boys), gratuitous sexual content in films such as Mean Girls, bad-influence celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and graphic song lyrics from pop stars such as Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado.

When it comes to the evidence, though, Prude is weaker. The statistics Liebau uses to support her argument will fail to shock. She tells us, for example, that “18 per cent of (teen) magazine articles pertain either to sex, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, contraception, or abortion”. But that means 82 per cent of the content is about something else. Thirty per cent of Seventeen magazine readers have “hooked up” with (teen-speak for physical intimacy as potentially innocent as kissing) someone they had met that day; 38 per cent said that being in a relationship where both partners had said “I love you” was enough for them to feel comfortable having sex. Thirty-five per cent of sexual acts depicted on TV take place between unmarried characters.

The examples Liebau offers of “rampant young teen sexuality” are similarly sparse; a 1999 documentary here, a few scattered reports of classroom fellatio there. She’s not wrong that these things happen, but the reason they get noticed is because they don’t happen every day. One of the articles she cites even acknowledges as much: “Relax, your kids probably aren’t having sex”, its headline reads. The segmentation of the TV market meant that Sex and the City was able to “run for years without ever penetrating the awareness of adults” – news to most adults, I’m sure.

But Liebau is a talented polemicist. I don’t share her politics but by the time I’d finished her book I shared some of her concerns about the impact of hypersexualised popular culture on the emotional and intellectual wellbeing of teenage girls. She sums up by asking:

Have the sexual revolution and do-me feminism allowed America’s young girls to really live happier lives? Are their thoughts, conversations, activities and preoccupations more elevated? Are they healthier in body, mind and spirit?

The answer, Liebau concludes, is obvious, and although I object to phrases such as “do-me feminism”, I’m not convinced she’s wrong. All the same, it feels as though Liebau – especially when read with Brooks’s more nuanced look at similar issues – has identified a cultural wound but hasn’t dug deeply enough to pinpoint what’s causing it.

Many of Liebau’s concerns are valid: the message that sexiness and appearance constitute the core of girls’ appeal to boys; the impact of “images of rail-slim, highly sexualised peers” on “healthy attitudes either towards sex itself – or towards their own imperfect but beautiful bodies”; the adversarial rather than co-operative relationships portrayed in music videos; the difficulties of delaying sex without being labelled “uncool, abnormal, or hopelessly undesirable”.

Especially persuasive is her chapter on teenage pregnancy, which “often condemns young women to a life of poverty and deprivation”, cutting their education short and robbing them of normal teenage experiences. But the morality Prude seems to advocate is not one that asks girls to think critically about the above and develop a set of ethical behaviours based on their own principles. Rather, it’s one that embraces what Liebau calls “a healthy sense of sexual shame”.

That assumes they don’t already have one. In Princesses and Pornstars, Sydney writer Emily Maguire recalls sitting in a high school health and development class:

Female sexual development, according to my teacher, was an embarrassing, uncomfortable process, but it would allow me to one day experience the miracle of motherhood.

She continues:

Boys would not feel “strange”: they would feel horny. They would be distracted by sexual thoughts and feelings. Their genitals would engorge with blood for no reason at all. They would feel a deep, low ache which could only be eased with sexual release. They would have erotic dreams from which they would wake to find they had messed up their sheets and pajamas. I am a boy, I thought, my face hot and my thighs pressed together.

Unsurprisingly it is Maguire’s tales of self-professed high school “slutdom” that have attracted most attention in media coverage of the book. But these are not gratuitous anecdotes: in each instance, Maguire uses stories from her life and others’ to illustrate why the women’s movement is still needed; she believes women continue to be shamed on the basis of who they sleep with and, to borrow for a moment from John Howard, the circumstances under which they sleep with them.

Feminism has always been grounded in the personal, and Maguire’s witticisms _ her first chapter is titled Your Vagina Is Not Like a Car – and evocative personal stories are designed to draw the sympathies of young women who, as the back cover blurb puts it, “grew up thinking the struggle was over”. Maguire’s easy writing style, which critiques but does not judge social mores, will appeal to this audience. If Princesses and Pornstars suffers, it’s because it tries to cover too much: slut-shaming, reality TV, princess culture, beauty and grooming, raunch culture, sex education, marriage and singledom, motherhood, work, pornography, choice feminism, the role of men in the movement and more, all in 200 pages. This means it provides a solid overview of the issues facing Australian women — a feminist primer, if you will — but lacks the depth to say much that will be new to anyone who already follows these issues.

While Consuming Innocence, Prude and, to a lesser extent, Princesses and Porn Stars examine the impact of sexualised culture without talking much about sex itself, The Porn Report is not so coy. Based on a three-year federal government-funded study by media studies academics Alan McKee, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby, it is billed as “the first piece of serious research” on pornography in Australia.

And serious research it is. The most striking thing about The Porn Report, given its controversial subject matter, is how rational it is. If it has an agenda (some reviewers have argued that it’s too upbeat about porn), it is well hidden beneath the numbers, interviews and carefully presented academic definitions. If you’re looking for something salacious to keep by the bedside table, this isn’t it. The Porn Report aims to dispel popular myths about pornography and the people who use it. If five million Australians consume porn, the authors ask, why are the only people we hear from on the issue those “whose claim to expertise … is the very fact that they don’t watch porn, aren’t friendly with anybody who watches porn and don’t know anything about the everyday use of porn?”

What’s most interesting about the picture the authors paint is how benign it is, especially when compared with the standard media commentary on the subject. Given the sheer number of people who use pornography, this perhaps should not come as a surprise. The porn consumers McKee, Albury and Lumby surveyed had jobs and social lives, engaged with TV, newspapers and books, and were spread fairly evenly across age groups. Many said they used porn as part of their relationships, rather than as an alternative. Most viewed it primarily on DVDs, not the internet.

The Porn Report also examines what’s on these DVDs, to determine whether “violence or the objectification of women, both issues that many Australians are concerned about, (are) common”. Of more than 800 scenes in Australia’s 50 best-selling porn videos (Buttbanged Naughty Nurses and Hairfree Asian Honeys, to name just two), less than 2 per cent contained violence. While the researchers manage to find “some horrible and very upsetting stuff” online, it is not mainstream and, they argue, “it takes a fair bit of work to find”.

The authors also dedicate a chapter to child pornography. Drawing on interviews with police and academic experts, they find that most of this material is available only in well-hidden online bulletin boards and newsgroups and consumed by “a very small underground circle of people”. While upsetting (“What the hell is wrong with people?” the authors ask, in a rare break from their academic approach), it is a world away from the subject matter dealt with elsewhere in The Porn Report and the other books discussed here, a distinction the authors are careful to make.

Which isn’t to say that the rest of The Porn Report will be a source of comfort for all readers: its authors acknowledge that the mainstreaming of pornography _ even benign pornography such as that portrayed through most of the book _ is “extremely confronting” for many people. The same can be said for the mainstreaming of other aspects of sexuality, in all its literal and symbolic forms, which is why we can expect such books to keep multiplying like rabbits.