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.]
