Becoming sexual: A critical appraisal of the sexualization of girls

R. Danielle Egan Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2013, 200pp., $22.95

ISBN: 978-0745650739 (paperback)

In her book Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualization of Girls , R. Danielle Egan investigates the contemporary discourse regarding the sexualization of tween girls (ages eight to twelve). Throughout her analysis, she scrutinizes the underlying assumptions and rhetorical strategies embedded in this discourse in order to argue that it metonymically disguises more formidable social anxieties. Ostensibly, the concern over girls' sexualization is a cultural anxiety for "innocent" girls who develop what are considered self-destructive, deviant and pathological sexual behaviors as a direct result of the images, ideas and products they consume via corporate capitalism, the media, and popular culture. As Egan illustrates, this concern over the sexualization of girls often unifies those from divergent political ideologies (from feminists to right-wing conservatives). It has infiltrated broader pedagogical and sociological discourses, and, as Egan argues, it has largely been legitimized by psychological reports like that of the Report of the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2010) or the United Kingdom Home Office report The Sexualisation of Young People (Papadopoulos, 2010).

Egan begins her study with a survey of the empirical research from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, National Institute of Mental Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and others. With these statistics as evidence, she works to refute the supposition that girls now engage in more sexual activity than in prior years. However, the sexual activity studies she charts for the U.S., U.K. and Australia span the teenage, not the tweenage, years. So although her account succeeds in showing that teenage girls' sexual activity has declined over the years according to numerous studies, it does little to prove that tweenage girls are not as sexually active as perhaps imagined and dreaded. Nevertheless, the apparent lack of data on the sexual behavior of tweenage girls does ultimately support her claim that fears about the sexualization of girls are not based on the facts of their actual sexual activity, since no facts appear to exist to base them on. Even in the APA report, the authors admit that, due to the...