The Eulogization of Youth and Eroticisation of Femininity: An Investigation Into Girlhood, Sexual Agency and Coming of Age

The Young-Girl is the commodity that insists on being consumed, at every instant, because at every instant she becomes more obsolete.

​Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

On the eve of my 21st birthday, I slept with a 42-year-old man. I had no real relation to him - he was my roommate’s boyfriend’s boss’s friend - and I had noticed him sitting in the same corner-spot week-in, week-out at a London co-working space we both frequented. I was given his name, contacted him on Facebook, and, honestly, there isn’t much more to the story: he divulged that he had noticed me, too; we briefly pretended to care about our virtual small talk; I floated the idea of us deciding on an evening to meet; he agreed; I suggested, unbeknownst to him, the night before my birthday, a prudently deliberate choice.

​I left his South Bank apartment at a quarter to Midnight and, sitting on the bus home to Hackney, feeling a mix of pride and indifference, I reflected on why this had been something I yearned to tick-off my proverbial list. I could not have cared less about the man: he was arrogant, irritating, and, frankly, excruciatingly boring, and I knew I never wanted to see him again; and yet I recognised him and I having sex as a true demonstration of my having come of age.

​I can’t help but wonder what – or, indeed, who – was shaping this desire in me. Arriving at his apartment, I felt more in power than ever; but was I? Why did my determination to satisfy a stranger’s destructive, sexist fantasy give me a sense of sexual agency? Why did I feel like it was my obligation to utilise my youth? Why do I feel like my time is running out – indeed, if it hasn’t done so already?

​In his essay Afternoon of the Sex Children, Mark Greif suggests that Americans are so tantalized by the notion of a perennial childhood on grounds of ‘the overwhelming feeling that one hasn’t yet achieved one’s true youth, because true youth would be defined by freedom so total that no one can attain it’. Indeed, youth is the perfect commodity: those who have it are hardly aware of it – to the extent of practically wanting to rid themselves of it - while those who want it can’t possibly achieve it. Youth really is wasted on the young.

Society instigates in its citizens – consumers – an almost implausibly intense commercial need to keep up a system where youth is perpetually glorified, as it is a material in constant decay and, well, as Greif writes: ‘when flesh sags, freedom will wane’. This supposed correlation between youth and a utopian state of being seems to find its roots in the impermanence of being young and its indefinable sensation of an elusive personal freedom, plus the lack of a clear definition of what causes you to lose it: is it a loss of purity? A loss of value? A loss of beauty? And why are all three asking the same question?

Youth is power because youth is fleeting; youth is power because ‘no one can attain it’; female youth is power because female youth is innocent, erotic, social capital. But when our society is one in which, echoing Berger’s Ways of Seeing, women exist to be observed and desired, and when the coming-of-age narrative is commodified to a degree nearing fetishization, the result is the sexualisation of youth and appropriation of female childhood; the two are distinct, but persistently continuous.

This conversation is all about social dynamics and how they form us, and how they result in women being deprived of their own coming-of-age by the very culture who instils in them a conviction that their adolescence is the most seminal, valuable, time in their life – all while insisting that she’s the one in power.

Merriam-Webster defines Lolita as a ‘precociously seductive girl’; perhaps, in your mind’s eye, you envision an impossible-to-resist, cunningly lubricious girl beguiling a helpless, ill-fated older man. But Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 12-year-old character - whose obsessive and perturbing stepfather, Humbert Humbert, grooms her into succumbing to having a sexual relationship with him - had her precocity attributed to her by her dismissive, predatory rapist. Her pre-adolescent body bears no conspicuous features of an irresistible, iconic siren – she is a child, one whose childhood is sexually appropriated and adolescent aptitude baulked.

‘The trouble with Lolita is plainly its ability to describe what a sexual 12-year-old looks like. […] the phrase for this is that it is “too real”; that’s the scandal’, proposes Greif. Indeed, it seems that Nabokov was aware of this, as his Humbert is exceedingly intent on stressing to the reader that his lechery causes no harm to the object of his desire, and that he obtains his pleasure purely from the act of observing her. This self-deception is, ostensibly, made a great deal more facile to manifest if one simply projects a supernatural identity onto one’s victim:

[…] sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask […] to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. […] We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to […] ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill. (Emphasis mine).

Humbert’s ‘poetic’ conversion of Dolores Gaze into Lolita, a fabricated character of his ‘innocuous’ imagination, one whose nymphet power is so overwhelming that he cannot help but to give in to temptation, allows him to ‘safely solipsize[d]’ her and convince himself that she simply doesn’t notice – nor mind – him molesting her.

​Most atrocious of all, however, is that we have turned a blind eye to the paedophilic origins and accepted the unreliable narrator’s characterization of Lolita as being sexually mature and manipulative. This socially accepted paedophilia prospers in our collective imagination as an almost encouraged Lolita syndrome: an erotic fantasy of escaping time, obtaining the unobtainable, and of reclaiming innocence – real or perceived.

The Danish quotidian phrase for a sex doll is Lolitadukke – Lolita doll. This seems fitting, albeit unsettling: like the inflatable figurine, Lolita was pliable, acquiescent, without agency. As the myth of Lolita, a symbol of youthful desirability, is refashioned into a sexual archetype for women, we promote the fetishization of young girls and their inherent complaisance.

In Humbert’s eyes, Lolita was jailbait, so delectably nubile yet deliciously chaste, unspoiled by life’s experiences and therefore all the more tempting to spoil; after all, what is purity if not the titillating promise of future sin? Have we forgotten that Humbert was the bad guy? Why are we repressing the fact that America’s promiscuous sweetheart was sexually assaulted and her childhood destroyed?

To suggest that Lolita was in power, that she was actively attempting to seduce him, is to believe Humbert’s solipsism of her – we bolster men like Humbert, as our fetishization of youth inclines us to believe that a 12-year-old girl had power over an adult man. Is our society really so turned on by youth (embodying it, consuming it, expropriating it) that we are willing to engage in the explicit hypocrisy of our synchronous celebration of women embodying the ‘precociously seductive girl’ and our abomination of pedophilia as an utter evil on par with murder?

What these films have in common is a photogenic teenage girl in the lead. Sometimes she is a cute and adorable cheerleader type who loves her parents and has a Pepto-Bismol-pink bedroom with 100 stuffed animals on the bed; sometimes she’s a dangerous temptress from a broken home who can barely keep her jeans above the top of her butt crack. Either way, she’s cute. Really cute. Check that. Not just cute. Flat-out sexy. (Emphasis mine).

Here, in Richard Roeper’s ‘The Jailbait Dilemma’, is yet another man’s disavowal of his power and responsibility. Roeper suggests that men are mere victims when it comes to the capacity of women, regardless of their age; as though every female is a merciless Medusa who simply cannot help but to turn men into stone – all they have to do is look at her, and she’s lost all control, instantly succumbing to the inevitability of her nature as a ‘dangerous temptress’. Ultimately, the ‘photogenic teenage girl’ is to blame for being too ‘flat-out sexy’ – if you don’t want older men ogling you, don’t be attractive, and don’t be young.

From the beginning of her career, Britney Spears epitomized palpable Lolita codes. Gyrating in music videos and praising God in interviews, Britney embodied the virginal but sexy, ripe but infantilized standard, playing with boundaries to the delight of our fetishizing public imagination. Nothing quite feeds into the Lolita myth’s playing around with innocence as much as the ‘naughty schoolgirl’ fantasy, perpetrated by Britney’s debut single and the accompanying music video, …Baby One More Time. I know that I don’t have to paint you a picture of what takes place in the four-minute production – it’s playing in your mind right now, isn’t it?

​Schoolgirl Britney was utopia personified: sexually youthful, sexually confident, sexually mature, but, crucially, sexually pure (no, all those things aren’t actually simultaneously possible, but this is what our popular culture does: a teen girl becomes a public commodity packaged and presented to our erotic imagination, onto which we may project creepy and crude fantasies as we guiltlessly maintain that she is the one with the agency). We are all Humbert Humberts, assigning her hypersexualised characteristics and prematurely debauching her, as she invites us to watch her come of age, employing Lolita-esque iconography of school uniforms, pigtails, teddy bears, and lollipops.

​Two years later and Oops, [Britney] Did It Again, offering herself to our sexual curiosity by declaring ‘I’m Not That Innocent’: well, how innocent is she then? Britney was 19 years old, and the tabloid-based discussion around her virginity (or lack thereof) was incessantly mythologized, because our culture awards young women who perform for our collective imagination without us having to admit to the fact that, when we see her as encapsulating utopia, it’s a paedophilic, commodifying one of the sort.

Mark Greif reflects: ‘Is it necessary to say that the majority of the sex children we see and desire are not legally childen? The representatives of the sex child in our entertainment culture are often 18 to 21 – legal adults. The root of their significance is that their sexual value points backward, to the status of the child, and not forward to the adult’. Britney was ours to own with our eyes, to eroticise, and we allowed ourselves the indulgence of the illusion that she was underage because she wasn’t.

​In Not a Girl, Not Yet A Woman, a song released three years after Britney asked us to ‘hit [her] baby one more time’, she again played with blurred semantics, literally singing about coming of age but existing in an interminable state of becoming, on the obscure threshold of becoming an adult. Operating in these incorporeal spaces with incorporeal social rules seemingly allowed us, including men like Richard Roeper, to arrive at our own, often sexualising, conclusions. Notably, the song was released alongside Britney’s movie, Crossroads, yet another play on the pop star’s ambiguity.

​The appeal of Britney Spears was the ease with which our society could agree on our entitlement to decide for ourselves how licentious she really was: here is an entertainer who wants to stage sex for the spectators’ benefit but who, thank God, has not been corrupted by actual sexual experience. But did she want to exude sex? Is questioning this agency misogynistic?

​The April 1999 issue of Rolling Stone paraded Britney’s naughty schoolgirl persona: on the magazine’s cover and in the following photo spread, Britney dons short-shorts, a cheerleader’s uniform, lingerie, and little else, all preceded by a headline broadcasting ‘Inside the Heart, Mind & Bedroom of a Teen Dream’. I’m sorry, why are we inside a 17-year-old’s bedroom? Indeed, why are we inside her at all? The literal and figurative undressing of the teen-girl celebrity is often praised as being anti-establishment: a young girl so self-assured, so independent, so in-control, that surely the only possibility is that she conducted the nature of the photo shoot. And, while it certainly was somewhat refreshing that she, outwardly, emanated sexual confidence, she was not the apotheosis of independence – rather, she was the establishment. Much like suggesting that little Lolita was an authoritative, sexual force to be reckoned with is ignoring the influence of the authoritative Humbert, so is insisting that Britney was the epitome of sexual agency a refusal to recognise that her power may have been undermined by her age: ‘as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded’, as Tavi Gevinson recently proposed.

While I’m inclined to affirm that Britney’s typification of jailbait was completely her prerogative (another Britney hit), then the insistence upon this fact being wholly true is a denial of our society’s prevailing, patriarchal power structures. Britney’s voice, lyrics, costumes, choreography, music videos, her entire image, were all evocative of the Lolita-esque icon we were all conditioned to look up to. Indeed, even if Britney was behind the composition of her façade, that simply evidences that girls’ sexualities, bodies, and identities are so thoroughly monitored by a society that disregards female agency and fetishizes female youth, that girls have become experts in perpetuating their own sexualisation. Thus, if Britney wanted to appear sultry, sexy, and suggestive, why was the go-to costume a juvenile school uniform? Perhaps even more pressing is why we continue to accept, celebrate and emulate this choice?

A girl’s childhood is never her own to explore and enjoy: seemingly from infancy, we are advised by all forms of popular media that the primary significance of a woman’s life is to be – and to remain, for as long as physically and financially possible – sexually desirable to men. It is impossible not to exemplify capitalism’s over-saturated message: you must strive for constant popularity, femininity, fuckability, immortality in order to remain attractive, influential, utopian. We are taught to observe and to comment on the way other young girls look and behave – and this scrutiny, hinged on male desire, turns inward, too, robbing girls of a healthy relationship with their childhood. John Berger writes:

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. […] From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. […] ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. […] To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it.

Because we are under the male gaze and fetishized from childhood, we become proficient in exploiting what makes us valuable – that we are part of the sustainment of these detrimental patterns does not mean that we are not also their exploited target. Like our attempt to possess our fleeting youth, so the gaze attempts to dominate the adolescent girl; her body is lusted after, idealised, #goals-ed. The cultural construct of girlhood objectifies the physical embodiment of her purity, of her untouched virtue. As Greif affirms, ‘the dream belongs to sixteen, or to those who can starve themselves to sixteen’.

The simultaneous sexualisation and infantilisation of women is a booming business in the world of pornography. The ‘not that innocent’ schoolgirl is a character frequently taken advantage of (pun intended): Hustler flaunts a ‘Barely Legal’ segment, Playboy exhibitionistically extols the youthful college girl in its annual ‘Girls of the Big Ten’ feature. Crucial to note here, however, is the fact that the girls presented in these segments do not look illegally young: yes, they are infant-like in their hairlessness, and oftentimes thin enough to be reminiscent of pre-pubescence, but the girls emit a sexual maturity that comforts the viewer. Like Britney, girls in the disturbingly popular ‘teen’ porn category are, generally, merely simulating youth: while our society demonises sexual abuse of children, the idea of it is, literally, too tantalising to abolish completely.

This fetishization of the teen girl implicates that the ideal condition for the woman is some illusionary infantile state of being; not a girl, not yet a woman indeed. Is what we want, sexually or otherwise, formed by true desire, or by the ingrained belief that our youth is our only source of power?

It doesn’t sit quite right with me today, how much I idealised the idea of a man being as consumed by me as Humbert Humbert was with Lolita – back then, I yearned for her sexual agency; now I realize that she hardly had any at all. Sitting on his sofa, the night before my socially recognised coming of age, I felt like I had ‘won’; I had ensnarled an older man while I was still in my prime. Was this really me dictating how I wanted to come of age? Why did he have to have anything to do with it? I was a girl alone with a man; I may have felt empowered, but I could hardly have been less powerful.

It is excruciatingly difficult for marginalised people, young girls very much included, to navigate sex, because it is never as easy as just electing to have it. I confidently insisted that girls are as competently intuitive as anyone, but I was blind to the irrefutable power dynamics at play – instead, I inevitably contributed to the perpetuation of the goal for young girls to capitalise on their erotic youth by being available to patriarchal society’s fantasy.

In a culture where youth is eulogized and femininity eroticised, and where girlhood exists to be sexualised, we are forced to navigate the norms that were built to vindicate men’s behaviour, habitually by virtue of sex positivity. But the popularly accepted synonymy of sexual confidence and sexual agency is mistaken at best and predatorial at worst – no matter how catchy the chorus is.