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Alberto Analco
John Kubler
English 114B
24 March 2015
Kids and Sexualization
Kids today grow up in a hyper sexualized society. From a very young age they are
programed to believe certain things. One of the first things we are taught as young boys and girls
is that there are boy toys and girl toys. Girls are expected to play with dolls usually colored pink
while boys are expected to play with GI Joes or toy trucks. As kids get older the differences
among the genders continue. Girls are expected to be feminine and care for others while boys are
expected to be more masculine and show no emotion. Our hyper sexualized society has a
negative effect on kids growing up because boys and girls are expected to dress, look, and
behave a certain way so they can fit in or feel happy. This also causes other serious issues like
self-esteem and health problems. These issues lead to the objectification of both boys and girls as
well but is seen more harshly on girls.
The documentary Sext Up Kids discusses the several ways teens are being affected
negatively by a sexualized society. One of these ways is on girls. The documentary explains that
as girls hit the teen years the damage mounts. There were strong associations with negative
health outcomes, mental health, depression, self-esteem (8:01). These negative results were the
result of young girls trying to be beautiful or sexy. If a girl didnt look the way a model
looked in an ad it would lower her self-esteem and we know that those images and standards are
incredibly high; so much that there very hard to achieve.
The film Crazy, Stupid, Love has some teens who want to be in a relationship. One of
those teens is a 13 year old who claims to be in love with his 17 year old babysitter. They go to
the same high school and it one scene the 13 year old boy, Robbie, claims and says, behold
Jessica, you are my soul mate in front of a large group of people during lunch (50:23). Jessica

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then tells him that he needs to stop and that she doesnt like him. Of course Robbie feels pretty
devastated because of this. This wasnt the worst of it though. Jessica actually liked Robbies dad
and she wanted him to notice her. In order to do this she decides to send him pictures of herself
naked. Her parents end up finding these pictures which gets her in trouble and turns into a
dramatically funny scene afterwards when they confront Cal. Similar things like this happen in
real life but they arent funny situations. There have been many instances where young teens
have sent naked or near naked photos of themselves to boys they like only to find out later that
the picture got out for the whole world to see. The girl would feel ashamed, of course, and this
would also lead to bullying. The girls would be called whores or other negative names for doing
this. The young teenage girls who did this would have to live with those mistakes for the rest of
their lives, mistakes that our hyper-sexualized society caused them to make.
In Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi we meet a young Iranian girl. She didnt grow up in a
hyper-sexualized society so her experiences as a child were different. Her government was very
controlling and allowed women to show no skin and very little hair. They were forced to wear a
veil to cover the hair on their heads. This resulted in her not worrying very much about how she
looked for boys. It wasnt until she moved to Austria, which can definitely be considered a
hyper-sexualized country, that she began to worry about how she looked. She started to use make
up when her sexualized friend Julie decided that she could look better. After she used make up
Marji said, from then on, became my usual make up (Satrapi 184). She did this to feel better
about the way she looked and her friend Julie had an impact on her becoming more sexualized.
This led to her having low self-esteem in some of her relationships with boys. An example of this
is on page 213, after having spent the night with her boyfriend Enrique she feels very insecure.
She automatically assumes the worst by thinking, its my fault! Im so unbelievably ugly
(Satrapi). Things get even worse after she leaves the hyper-sexualized country. When she went

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back home to Iran, she became very depressed. She said, I decided to die (272). After that she
tries to kill herself twice but fails. If it hadn't been for her going to and living in a hypersexualized society Marji would not have tried to kill herself. That society caused her to have
many negative emotions even after she left it.
In the article ''The Sexualization of Childhood'', Mary G. Burke talks about the issues that
Sharna Olfman, a professor of Psychology, brings up in her book. The book mentions a lot of
negative effects that Sexualization has on young high school girls. She mentions that, ''more than
half of high school girls are preoccupied with their weight and engage in unhealthy
dieting/exercise practices'' and that ''overall, women bear a disproportionate share of the global
burden of mental illness, with the excess accounted for by those illnesses that have the highest
correlation with chronic environmental stress (e.g., anxiety, EDs, psychosomatic symptoms, and
depression)'' (Burke 1). The writer is saying that sexualization has a negative impact on women
and that the proof is in some of the illnesses that continue to increase. The illnesses presented are
brought on by what the person suffering from the illness believes, such as anxiety from not
looking a certain way or depression from low self-esteem which the character from Persepolis
suffered from.
Our hyper-sexualized society affects boys negatively as well. Girls are expected be
feminine while boys are expected to be masculine. I have a personal experience that relates to
this issue. In middle school, I remember I usually had low self-esteem because I was so skinny. A
lot of the other kids were taller and stronger than me so I felt pretty bad. I tried working out with
a friend just so I could be more confident about the way I looked. Eventually when I got into
high school though I just accepted that I wasnt as tall or strong as the other kids but that was
okay I didnt have to look like that to be happy. Although it wasnt a huge issue in my case, this
still showed how negatively a hyper-sexualized can affect boys and girls.

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Growing up in a hyper-sexualized society isn't easy. From a very early age boys and girls
are expected to act and dress a certain way to fit in, for girls it is to be noticed by boys. These
things lead to negative effects in women's health. The proof that our hypersexualized society is
affecting teens is there and as long as we have these gender expectations and high standards
these problems will continue.

Works Cited
Burke, Mary G. "The Sexualization of Childhood."Journal of the American Academy of Child &
Adolescent Psychiatry, 48.7 (2009): 768-770. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.
Crazy, Stupid, Love. Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Perf. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling,
Julianne Moore, and Emma Stone. Warner Brothers, 2011. Film.
Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. Print.
Sext Up Kids. Dir. Maureen Palmer. Rick LeGuerrier, Timothy M. Hogan. Dream Street
Pictures, 2012. Film.

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