Sexuality, youth and the perils of endangered innocence: how history can help us get past the panic

Abstract

Popular discourses on the problem of sexualisation are beset by emotively charged rhetoric that all-too-often promotes a visceral and affective response as opposed to reasoned and nuanced examination. Drawing on materials from the Social Purity Movement (1860–1910) as well as contemporary anti-sexualisation literature, this article argues that a historical-situated perspective may help authors, activists and advocates offer a more reflexive perspective on ‘the problem of sexualisation’. We forward a historically informed discourse analysis to render visible the longstanding, and deeply problematic, assumptions of childhood, gender and class at work in current concerns on sexualisation.

Keywords:

• sexualisation
• cultural studies
• history
• girlhood
• critical theory
• social class

Notes

She is noted in the text as Mrs J. H. Kellogg, but I decided to use her full name as opposed to her husband's.

Purity advocates rejected the mechanistic theories of and treatment for masturbation espoused by the nineteenth-century physicians. However, they shared with the medics who perpetuated masturbation phobia a concern for the dangerous impacts of masturbatory activities on children who practiced what they conceptualised as vice.

We have noted the methodological and conceptual flaws inherent to the APA report and media effects research on sexualisation see Buckingham and Bragg (2004), Egan and Hawkes (2008, 2009) and Veera (2009) for more details.