Shaping Youth Is In the L.A. Times Today, Yawn

August 12, 2009 Well, it finally happened. Full tilt desensitization.

I suppressed a huge yawn and a roll of the eyes reviewing Miley’s pole dancing antics at the Teen Choice Awards with a great big ‘meh, here we go again.’

All of the replays of video and trending topics in the Twittersphere landed on me as a great big cynical ‘so what‘ example of the mouse house marketing machine in full swing.

Today’s LATimes story quotes me, but truth be told, when the reporter called me I barely looked up from my keyboard and shirked it off in ‘yah, I know all about it, and probably need to cover it’ style which revealed a ho-hum fatigue in my voice.

LA Times’ Dawn Chmielewski is a thorough journalist who ‘gets it’ in terms of how media is influencing kids and she always does her homework sans sensationalism…So I agreed to speak while simultaneously pointing her toward all the ‘usual suspects’ with pithy soundbites and research nuggets from stakeholders far more versed in dealing with the public eye.

Such as? Packaging Girlhood, So Sexy So Soon’s Jean Kilbourne & Diane Levin, S.Y.’s child development expert on body image Dr. Robyn Silverman etc. It’s no secret I prefer staying BEHIND the keyboard and am reticent about insta-media attention. (My NYT/Target experience helped that) But here’s the noteworthy thing:

As I reviewed Miley’s writhing with a flatline EKG, and narry a raised eyebrow it made me stop and wonder why the age compression and TCA controversy did NOT elicit a stronger reaction within me.

(Emily Bartek’s 13 Going on 30 post sums what the development meeting might sound like, which left me grinning, as it’s similar to the Mike Berenstain interview I wrote imagining a Hollywood pitch session trying to ‘spin’ his wholesome bears to ‘sell.’ )

I asked myself, “Has pornification of females become THAT normalized with slithering Axe Bomchickawawa girls and Beyonce’s Deréon divas posed as Sesame Streetwalkers that it’s become a punchline in itself? Is it the sheer pervasiveness, quantity and repetition of ‘shock schlock’ in a coarse media/marketing culture that’s shifted the dynamic to being ‘a bore?’

No…it’s because I already knew the ‘media conversation’ would miss the freakin’ point (just like the Target debacle).

It would veer away from the global impact of objectification, how it’s landing on kids, and fouling up a healthy sense of sexuality…

Instead, the Age of Conversation would quickly devolve into a petty, prickly snipefest of whether Miley was “just holding onto the pole for stability” or presenting a provocative pornified bump-n-thrust to “shake off the mouse glove” as a career move, as music critic Jessica Hopper stated in the article.

The larger conversation about kids getting damaged and the APA study (72pp) on the harm of early sexualization is what counts.

The rest is a snore for the talking heads of the ‘left and the right’ to spar about decency and conduct and cluck about ‘today’s kids’ yadayada.

I’ve already fielded calls and tweets with accusations of some invisible ‘agenda,’ or who is ‘behind the cause’ …So let’s be clear…Repeat after me:

Shaping Youth is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501c3 consortium with no political, religious, or censorship agenda.

Our only ‘cause’ is the emotional and physical well-being of children.

Period. Exclamation mark.

I’ll do a follow up with quotes from all of the academic rockstars I already mentioned, and post my interview with Jean Kilbourne of So Sexy So Soon who pioneered this conversation and has been in the trenches with her numerous documentaries and research on the quantifiable damage to kids for countless years. Stay tuned.

It’s far more worthy of media coverage than the Miley incident.

Let’s hope media ‘gets it.’