Appropriate Panties Will Not Stop Little Girls From Growing Up

For all the myths about British sexual repression, I reckon this place is pretty darn open about sex. But the current government have lately become worried about the sexualization of children in the UK. Teenage pregnancy has actually dropped by 5.9 percent since 2008 but this is a government who won’t let the facts get in the way of dodgy policy. No, let’s just blame the hitherto vaguely defined sexualization of children for causing hordes of high school students overrunning the nation with prams.

So what are the government doing to stop this alleged crisis? Why, they got Mothers Union involved. This is a Church of England charity that seeks to support families worldwide, a perfectly worthwhile organization. To be more precise, they got the CEO of Mothers Union to write a report. Bizarrely for an organization that is almost exclusively women, the CEO is a middle-aged bloke with no background in researching sexuality, human behaviour or social policy. Before becoming the boss of Mothers Union, he was the CEO of a Danish bacon company. How relevant for the task at hand.

It seems that the biggest conclusions the Mothers Union made in regards to the sexualization of kids is that we must make sure all girls under the age of consent are wearing suitable underwear rather than the bras for the boobless that you see in shops here, all lads’ mags are on the top shelf and wrapped in pages of the Bible and all gyrating music videos are screened at a time when all good kids are in bed.

Call me crazy but if parents simply stop buying their kids inappropriate undies and T-shirts emblazoned with such witticisms as “Porn Star In Training” then the shops might stop selling them. Then the mountains of unsold slutty T-shirts and pants can be given to children in poor countries. Kidding.

And given we have this newfangled worldwide interpipe thingy on every computer and phone in the land, the plans to shield the kids from an errant breast photo by moving the lads’ mags to the top shelf seems to be the censorship equivalent of trying to blow away an Icelandic volcanic ash cloud with a hairdryer.

So that leaves us with those troublesome rude music videos. Seriously, Mothers Union, this sort of thing has been causing people to call for the smelling salts since Salome danced for Herod sometime around AD34. Early TV footage of Elvis only showed him from the waist up in case his pelvic thrusting in case the kids worked out what else they can do with their genitals. I used to dance to Kenny Everett as a five-year-old. The camp humour went over my head and frankly, even if I did turn out gay, that would not be a Bad Evil Thing and it would be because of the wonder of nature, not because I saw a gay guy impersonate Barbra Streisand with a growing nose in 1981.

It became clear how ludicrous the hysteria has all become when I was at a baby shower. The expectant mother’s three-year-old daughter got a bit excited at the videos on 4Music and soon she was doing a fine Beyonce imitation. She is at the age where one is short and fearless enough to think nothing of dropping to the floor from a standing position. Soon she was wriggling and bumping about in time to the music, laughing madly.

It wasn’t sexual. It was cute, it was fun, hell, it may be the start of a great dance career for all we know. Only a pervert or some moralist who thinks way more about sex than the average, sexually healthy person does would have had a freaky reaction to such a scene.

As a bonus, she was dancing to the song Rule The World (Girls) — a much better choice for any girl to dance to than, say, Smack My Bitch Up. And then the appalling Chris Brown appeared on telly and, in a display of excellent taste, she promptly left the room to go and play with her basket of plastic vegetables.

The government’s plan has so far only trivialised the complexity of the issues involved and probably won’t do a damn thing to stop teenage pregnancies, paedophiles or underage sex. But as long as the kids are wearing plain pants, Beyonce’s bottom is safely out of sight and Nuts magazine is tucked away behind Martha Stewart Living, everything’s going to be just fine.

Georgia Lewis is a journalist who lives in London. Contact her here.