Capitalism and the Commodification of Children

Read this.  And when you do, don't weep.  Just ask yourself what the hell you plan to do about it.

Here's an excerpt:

Complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, with a politics defined by market power, the American public offers little resistance to children's culture being expropriated and colonized by Madison Avenue advertisers. Eager to enthral kids with invented fears and lacks, these advertisers also entice them with equally unimagined new desires, to prod them into spending money or to influence their parents to spend it in order to fill corporate coffers. Every child is vulnerable to the many advertisers who diversify markets through various niches, one of which is based on age. For example, the DVD industry sees toddlers as a lucrative market. Toy manufacturers now target children from birth to ten years of age. Children aged eight to twelve constitute a tween market and teens an additional one. Children visit stores and malls long before they enter elementary school, and children as young as eight years old make visits to malls without adults. Disney, Nickelodeon and other mega companies now provide web sites such as "Pirates of the Caribbean" for children under ten years of age, luring them into a virtual world of potential consumers that reached 8.2 million in 2007, while it is predicted that this electronic mall will include 20 million children by 2011.(16 ) Moreover, as Brook Barnes points out in The New York Times, these electronic malls are hardly being used either as innocent entertainment or for educational purposes. On the contrary, she states, "Media conglomerates in particular think these sites - part online role-playing game and part social scene - can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers." (17) But there is more at stake here than making money and promoting brand loyalty among young children: there is also the construction of particular modes of subjectivity, identification and agency.

 

Some of these identities are on full display in advertising aimed at young girls. Market strategists are increasingly using sexually charged images to sell commodities, often representing the fantasies of an adult version of sexuality. For instance, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing franchise for young people, has earned a reputation for its risque catalogues filled with promotional ads of scantily clad kids and its over-the-top sexual advice columns for teens and preteens; one catalogue featured an ad for thongs for ten-year-olds with the words "eye candy" and "wink wink" written on them.(18) Another clothing store sold underwear geared toward teens with "Who needs Credit Cards ...?" written across the crotch.(19) Children as young as six years old are being sold lacy underwear, push-up bras and "date night accessories" for their various doll collections. In 2006, the Tesco department store chain sold a pole dancing kit designed for young girls to unleash the sex kitten inside . Encouraging five- to ten-year-old children to model themselves after sex workers suggests the degree to which matters of ethics and propriety have been decoupled from the world of marketing and advertising, even when the target audience is young children. The representational politics at work in these marketing and advertising strategies connect children's bodies to a reductive notion of sexuality, pleasure and commodification, while depicting children's sexuality and bodies as nothing more than objects for voyeuristic adult consumption and crude financial profit.

 

For the last few decades, critics such as Thomas Frank, Kevin Phillips, David Harvey and many others have warned us, and rightly so, that right-wing conservatives and free-market fundamentalists have been dismantling government by selling it off to the highest or "friendliest" bidder. But what they have not recognized adequately is that what has also been sold off are both our children and our collective future, and that the consequences of this catastrophe can only be understood within the larger framework of a politics and market philosophy that view children as commodities and democracy as the enemy. In a democracy, education in any sphere, whether it be the public schools or the larger media, is, or should be, utterly adverse to treating young people as individual units of economic potential and as walking commodities. And it is crucial not to "forget" that democracy should not be confused with a hypercapitalism.

[Read the rest, here.]