In today’s time, how to be seductive or even provocative is being shown at a very young age. Today’s girls are shown these things in many different ways but one very large way is Disney. Pictured, is Navaya (four years old) wearing a Tinker Bell dress. She is also wearing long sleeves and pants. Why you might ask? Because the dress was made so thin, just like Tinker Bells, that if she wasn’t to wear the clothing underneath you would be able to see right through it. Disney does this with almost every character they make. They sexualize young children’s role models and when the children decide they want to dress like that character, the parents are shamed for letting their children do so. Not to mention, things like this create a very prominent double standard in children. If a boy wants to go play outside with no shirt on during the summer that’s accepted, but if a girl were to do the same everyone would make a huge deal out of it. It is all in what we put in children’s minds. Creators like Disney should be influencing for the better not creating a worse issue. Like Lillian says in the Girl Culture photo essay “But the city definitely teaches you that youth and sexuality go hand in hand. It’s really kind of sick” (Girl Culture 27). I couldn’t agree more. Girls are taught to be sexualized at a young age which only makes things worse as you grow. Girls are not only taught to be sexualized but they are taught to accept being sexualized whether they are comfortable or not. In this photo Navaya is happy and carefree because her mom found a way for her to wear the Tinker Bell dress without looking as inappropriate as Disney made the dress. Girl culture is affected by a lot in the media and then it grows into children’s minds and becomes accepted. Thus, it has become a never-ending cycle unless we teach our children correctly that sexualizing girls or boys is not okay and we can’t create our opinions and base our choices off of the media.
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