Product Description: Pop culture---and the advertising that surrounds it---teaches young girls and boys five myths about sex and sexuality:
-Girls don't choose boys, boys choose girls--but only sexy girls -There's only one kind of sexy--slender, curvy, white beauty -Girls should work to be that type of sexy -The younger a girl is, the sexier she is -Sexual violence can be hot
Together, these five myths make up the Lolita Effect, the mass media trends that work to undermine girls' self-confidence, that condone female objectification, and that tacitly foster sex crimes. But identifying these myths and breaking them down can help girls learn to recognize progressive and healthy sexuality and protect themselves from degrading media ideas and sexual vulnerability. In The Lolita Effect, Dr. M. Gigi Durham offers breakthrough strategies for empowering girls to make healthy decisions about their own sexuality.
Scary logic Is this book a bad joke? Is Durham really blaming Victoria's Secret, Barbie dolls, Peek-a-Boo Pole Dancing Kits, and media images supposedly inciting girls to act out "Lolita" fantasies for global teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, HIV, child prostitution, sex tourism, sex slavery, deaths from pregnancy and childbirth, intertribal rape in Africa, and Islamic honor killings? Can she be serious?
Durham's illogic is scary. And so is her gross misinformation. First, contrary to Durham's claim that media images are causing increased "teenage pregnancy," teen pregnancy rates actually are plummeting worldwide, especially for the youngest ages. In the U.S., the most recent National Center for Health Statistics reports show pregnancy rates for girls under age 15 have fallen to their lowest level ever recorded, as are birth rates among all teenagers. There was a slight increase in births among older teens in 2006 after 15 straight years of decline, hardly evidencing a "Lolita effect" and still leaving the teen birth rate near the lowest levels measured in 80 years of records. United Nations tabulations show similarly falling teen birth trends in most other countries.
Second, FBI and National Crime Victimization reports likewise show rape, sexual violence, and violent crime against both younger and older teenage girls are at their lowest levels since tabulations began 35 years ago. The best information indicates girls today are safer and less likely to get pregnant than any past generation we can reliably assess. I realize the news media and interest groups constantly try to profit by scaring us into thinking sex and violence are rising, but we should expect PhDs like Durham to do original research and provide accurate information.
Third, Durham wildly exaggerates surveys of teenage sexual activity, comparisons with the original reports she cites show. A lot of the scary numbers and trends in "The Lolita Effect" seem to be copied secondhand from unreliable sources or simply made up by someone.
I understand that Durham and others are deeply offended, often rightly, at many aspects of popular culture. But that doesn't justify her wholesale butchery of facts to manufacture the misimpression that girls today are more dangerous and endangered and to downplay serious threats that do exist.
The most offensive aspect of this book is Durham's suggestion that sexual violence, rape in African tribal wars, murders of girls by Islamic fundamentalists, maternal and infant mortality, and impoverished and abandoned children forced into prostitution are rooted in young girls acting out Lolita fantasies. Despite feminist pretenses, Durham resurrects primitive 19th century notions that girls are weak, self-destructive ninnies corrupted by the sinful culture they seek and in need of more restriction and supervision. But isn't it really the men who rape and exploit girls who should be held responsible? Why isn't this book titled, "The Humbert Effect"?
The reader has to wade 200 pages into this book before Durham mentions (briefly) some real causes of girls' victimization: domestic violence, epidemic poverty, repressive anti-female customs, brutal tribalism, and war. Durham also admits (briefly) that sexual exploitation and violence against girls was worse in the past, long before MTV, MySpace, and pushup bras. But "The Lolita Effect" is a conventional, puritan book that spends pages berating the sins of fictional media without bothering to show they have anything to do with real-life dangers. Durham rhetorically affirms girls' right to sexuality but then righteously disapproves of even their mildest sexual expressions.
I worked in child abuse prevention and youth programs for years and now analyze the rampant misinformation on young people. Books like this one manufacturing silly, sensational pop-culture panics obscure real, hard-to-confront dangers to girls like poverty and family violence. They also create unwarranted fears of and for girls, who in reality and are handling pop culture and modern life remarkably well and are not as stupid and corrupted as Durham thinks. http://www.YouthFacts.org
I can't get over this I really had the intent of buying this until I read a good amount of it in the local bookstore. Sounds like it would be a interesting read. But right off the bat I had trouble w/ the book and the author. It bugs me that the author is against "Sexualization" of young girls and then sells a book w/ a very young attractive blond girl on the cover w/ her head tilted slightly back and mouth open in a moaning fashion. It seems she's against Sexualizing young girls EXCEPT for when it for her. Another issue I have w/ her message has to do w/ the same reason why Sensitivity Training in big companies fail. They fail because they call too much attention to the behaviors. Now a black person or a little person or whoever sitting in a meeting knows that everyone around them IS actually thinking about all those things their not supposted to say. Same thing here. The author goes around to schools and teaches these things to kids. Now I'm not saying kids shouldn't be taught to watch out for B.S. in the world. But at a couple point in the book I got the feel that she was actually trying to make kids see everything her way. Kids who saw innocent things as Innocent thing were now being taught that they are sexual in nature. I don't know if I'm making that as clear as I wanted -- but hopefully you get the point. Anyway, IMO save your money. Let your kids be kids. Spend time w/ them. Love them when they're younger so they'll be better when they're older. Teach them to question the world and watch out for B.S. And leave this feminist book alone. I'm tired of these books that come out and try to say that men in socialty have more power then women. Read up on human evolution and natural history and you'll see just how wrong that really is. UPDATE I picked this book up again to give it another chance. NOW I don't even want to give it one star. She has some wild idea in her head that us (Men) are taught what to find attractive. On the back of the book and in sections inside the book she almost says "boys are taught that only attractive is sexy" Now those aren't her exact words. But trust me I'm really not far off! Not just men but people all over the world in every culture are attracted to HEALTH People. There's a reason most people aren't attracted to mates that are too old or fat or unhealthy! If we choose mates that are unhealth then the human raise would have died out a long time ago! Doesn't anyone else get that? We (men and women) do not have to taught what is attractive. Attraction isn't a choice! Never has been! Never will. We don't look at a girl and say "Hmmmm She's blonde. Has good skin. Of mating age. Has a great body. Mmmmm YES! I'm going to be attracted to that!" But the auther doesn't seem to think we have instincts. I'll tell you what, let's take a young boy and hide him from all women and images of women till he's a teen. Then show him a picture of Roseanne Bar and a picture of Paris Hilton. Then ask him which is more attractive. And I promise you after he's done killing you for locking him up, he'd run away w/ the picture of Paric Hilton! I'll bet a million dollars on that! Because she is more naturally then Roseanne. Then the author throws in a chapter on Violence and sex! Horror movies and such. What does this have to do w/ a Lolita Effect? Sex and violence are different things. She's trying to make the same old stupid go-nowhere point that images of violence will lead to rape. How stupid is that? There is NOTHING in all of science to support such ideas or claims. The author also twist the movies around to try and make her point. Maybe she was hoping that no one who saw those movies would read her book. OR (and I'm really scared of this one) she really believe what she says and thinks everything always lead to sex. IMO if that is true she need to talk to some one. It really felt like she was trying to make the point that in Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween that young Michael Meyers kills his family cause his mom is a stripper. Is she out of her mind or just twisting the facts? There are even parts in the book where she's talking to young kids. Then a boy will make a point against what she just said. Rather then say to the kid "hey, you're smart! You're right, not everything you see on TV is bad" she just trys to brush it off as "WEll these kids don't get it".
I dislike this book more and more, everytime I read through it. Don't buy it!
Repetative & Contradicting This book is repetative and condradicting in and of it self. The stats given are from all over the world, and very few from the US.
The Cover Story To those who may find the cover art hypocritical.
Might it be the cover is to grab the attention of someone who might not otherwise read the book? And NEEDS to read the book? Yes, maybe it sell more books, but to reach those who need the message, you need to reach the basic instinct first. They see the cover of the book, pick it up, read a bit of it... and maybe, you can get someone who hadn't thought about this before, to start thinking about it. Even if the book gets put back on the shelf, the idea has now entered that someone's conciousness. Let's face it, a book with NO face on it is not going to grab the attention of those who truly need thier eyes opened to the issue.
an eye-opener--a must-read for parents and teachers I see there are a number of other positive reviews up already, but I wanted to add my two cents. Durham's argument is powerful and extremely accessible. I admit that I had never taken notice of a lot of the extremely harmful and negative trends in modern media that Durham points out, and I had certainly never drawn a connection between the exploitation of women in pop culture and some of its truly insidious effects (from teaching girls to undervalue themselves to inadvertently making themselves vulnerable to sex crimes and exploitation). Since I finished reading the book, I have started looking at the world in a slightly different way.
For me, the most helpful component was the conversation strategies at the end of each chapter. It seems like negotiating these conversations with your children would be difficult, but Durham provides real and usable dialogue starters and ideas for prompts. The book is a real tool as well as a major piece of news.
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