Today we continue to deepen this issue that we want to address in depth this week given its relevance and the social concern that logically produces: girls' hypersexualization and the patterns of beauty and adult behavior transmitted by the media.
We interviewed, on this occasion, the psychologist Diana Sánchez, who can you know better on their professional page. Mother of 2 children, psychotherapist, perinatal psychologist and sexologist, will explain to us the vision of the process that can produce in girls the hypersexualization to which some media that encourage unreachable and even harmful stereotypes.
What do you think about the use of girls in adult or provocative positions or clothes for advertising purposes?
Well, I would tell you that we live in a hypocritical society, in which it is difficult to have sexual relations with minors, we hyperprotect children and do not let them go out alone, but then we let a girl become a pure sexual object without any shame , neither by the parents who consent to it nor by those who promote it.
Girls are hypersexualized and dressed as women, and older women want to look like girls and hide their age at the expense of even losing their health.
There is no collective conscience about the damages that this type of attitudes and behaviors entail in the psyche of a girl who ceases to be to meet the demand of amoral adults.
And about that little girls paint or wear heels or provocative clothes or that their dolls go like this?
But in what sense? I ask you why my daughter takes my paintings off and paints ... and my heels she puts on at home. I don't see him to go out, it's like Tom Cruise's daughter, Suri, has been wearing heels since he was two. I think it's something that is bad for your health first, and second, I think that girls have to be allowed to be girls. And the thing about painting, because the same thing is like when I see that in the US competitions they wear girls dressed and painted of woman. That horrifies me.
One thing is a game and another to mark provocative images with dolls dressed as sexually provocative women according to the canons of the most macho fashion, isn't it?
I think that kind of dolls are another way of trying to hypersexualize girls. But in our time there were also Barbies, and well. The point is that they are a stereotype of a woman that does not exist, and the model is not real. That can create unreal expectations. The same as the Monster High, or the Bratz, have impossible body dimensions. Those images are staying there, it is like the excessive use of Photoshop in the models, it can get to disfigure the reality so much that it can also have negative consequences. There I think parents have to be very attentive.
Is there, therefore, a pattern of hypersexualization in advertising?
I would say yes, that this pattern of hypersexualization exists, but that it is very polarized. Either girls leave very girls, fulfilling fully established clichés, or sometimes girls who do not look like it come out.
And what reasons are there for it?
In my opinion in advertising the fact of using the images of very young girls, or even girls, it seems to me that it has the object of projecting that image of eternal youth, and even innocence. Although behind it, I really believe that there is the adult sexual fantasy. It is a bit strong and very controversial issue, and I never think that a publicist would know because maybe it is even something very archaic in him. Young girls are more fertile, and surely today's men repress this type of unconscious desires because morally it is not acceptable, and legally punishable. But the unconscious mind is not easily controllable. And these drives, which also respond to the theory of evolution, could also have the same relationship.
Why are girls forced to follow those patterns imposed by advertising?
It is as far as the power of the publicity and the image that is given to the girls, the cultural Anthropologist Winfried Menninghaus, says that the appearance of the photography, and especially the cinema and the TV has influenced of irremediable form. The photos of the most famous women have been seen all over the world, and we see the most extreme body shapes, the result of omnipresent extreme treatments in the media, this causes a mechanism related to the theory of evolution, with a devastating effect on us . We are programmed, like most animals, to get an idea of what normal physical appearance is based on all the images we are familiar with. The effects of the media are nothing more than a total deformation of what is normal.
At what age should we start sex education specific to our children?
I believe that sexual education should begin to be given, as well as the rest of formal and compulsory education. In other words, start with notions about 6 or 7 years. But, since sexuality is something inherent in the human being. And when children begin to feel their body, which is very soon, we should begin to answer their questions. And when I talk about sexuality, I mean all the reproductive fact, and it would include pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and menopause. Not only sexual physiology, which is what they are taught today.
We greatly appreciate the psychologist Diana Sánchez that he shared with us his thoughts about girls' hypersexualization, a topic that Babies and more wanted to give an in-depth treatment this week with an article in which we analyze the complexity of the problem and with a series of interviews with specialists that tomorrow will culminate with a new talk with the psychologist Olga Carmona. Do not miss it.
