Watching “Sexy Baby”: a Movie Documentary

“We are constantly amazed at the challenges girls are presented with today. When we were growing up things just didn’t seem as complicated. With the Internet and social media bringing sex and sexual content right into our homes, we have often wondered what the impact is on young girls and women today. The new feature documentary film, Sexy Baby, gives us an inside look into the new cultural shift taking a hold of America. Intimate, candid conversations and personal storytellingng expose this new reality. It is shocking and disturbing, but also a wake up call”.
(from http://www.womenyoushouldknow.net/sexy-baby-sexiness-the-c…/)

This is another brilliant (although a bit painful to watch I must admit…) 2012’s movie documentary from co-directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus (the same directors of the recent Hot Girls Wanted), available in full format from You Tube.

After a powerful intro consisting of a fast-paced collage of images and clips cuts from popular media /news effectively depicting the sexual saturation of today’s mass media, the movie documentary starts with some young girls watching Lady Gaga in her sexually provoking “Poker Face” video while imitating her moves – a familiar sight for most people these days – then the camera filmed what appear as a 5-6 years old girl giggling “Britney Bitch”, mimicking the famous Will i Am ‘s song.

The documentary follow the lives of 3 women (one of them is actually still a young girl just becoming teenager): an ex porno-movies star who is trying to get pregnant, a 12 year old girl experimenting with her identity and a 22 year old who yearns for “normal” private parts.

What I’ve liked about this documentary is the non-judgemental way is filmed and the way it captures the reality of living in a media-saturated world.  I would have loved to see more racial diversity in it, but that’s about it. The documentary is available now to watch in different formats and, considered its sexually-explicit nature, the authors have produced an edited educational version aimed to a younger audience for its screening into schools (which I’d be really keen to show to the girls taking part in my offline projects).

Sexy Baby is the first documentary film to put faces to a seismic cultural shift: the cyber age is creating a new sexual landscape. While doing research for the film, we had intimate and candid conversations with kids in middle school classrooms, suburban shopping malls, nightclubs, college dorms, and even conducted an informal roundtable during a high school house party. While chronicling trends among small town and big city kids, we discovered this: Having pubic hair is considered unattractive and “gross.” Most youngsters know someone who has emailed or texted a naked photo of themselves. Many kids have accidentally or intentionally had their first introduction to sex be via hardcore online porn. Facebook has created an arena where kids compete to be “liked” and constantly worry about what image to portray – much of what was once private is now made public. And the list goes on… –– (C) Sexy Baby Official Site

“We are the first generation to have what we have, so there is no one before us that can… kind of GUIDE US…I mean we are the PIONEERS” says Winnifred – a 12-year-old girl from New York.

What Winnifred says reflects the thinking of many other kids: they often feel that they live in a world which adults can’t understand fully. They are suspicious of our judgements and our perspective on things because after all we grown up in a completely different era, where computers, internet and social media were not around, so – in their view – how can we possibly guide them through this new sexual landscape? As parents and educators, perhaps we should ask ourselves: how much do we truly know about this new world and about our children’s world?

An interesting documentary about children’ sexualisation

sext up kids doc

This is a very recent documentary from US regarding the sexualisation of children through media and marketing.

The documentary does a good job in making us reflect on the different values pushed on our kids by media, advertising and celebrity culture and it does stress how the reality in which children live today has dramatically changed from even a few years ago: they are constantly bombarded by images and messages, but there is rarely any guidance provided to them regarding how these messages and images are produced and which financial/political/ideological interests are behind certain representations.

The film stresses also the necessity of providing media literacy interventions at an earlier age. We can’t wait for kids to be 12-13: at that point they will have already ingrained into them an incredible amount of messages/images on how to be successful, popular, sexy, beautiful, rich and so on!

The other day I was at a friend’s barbecue and I had the chance of watching with interest one of my friends reproaching (in a very stern way) her own daughter for posing and dancing in a sexually suggesting manner. Being the girl only 5 years old, the scene was actually quite disturbing for many adults to watch and embarrassing to say the least. The girl could not understand in the slightest why reproducing something that she actually seen many times over in TV shows or the internet was a reprehensible thing.

I felt both her pain and the one of her mother!

Only a few years ago adults’ sexual fantasies and imaginary were carefully screened from children view, so we did not have to deal with this sort of problems.

Today everything is on show and children watch with interest, indeed! There is a also a growing emphasis on sex and being sexy in the media, while at home or at school children are discouraged or told off if they express any sexuality or imitate any of the images and behaviours they see so often on TV, the WEB, magazines and so on.

Children are thus living constantly connected, in a constant flow of images and messages which suggest them to be and act in a certain way, but they are expected at the same time from their family, parents and educators to refrain from reproducing the hyper-sexualised nature of these images/messages: what we demand from them is to continue “behaving like a child”, despite the constant pressure surrounding them and the natural, playful, psychologically relevant attitude of children to imitate adult behaviour.

How unrealistic our demand is! To expect from a child to know a priori whether a certain behaviour, action, presentation, performance is right or wrong without providing any guidance and advice regarding the nature of this ever-growing and ubiquitous media content…

…this is not just unrealistic, it is preposterous and unfair.

So let’s watch, reflect and move forwards: let’s give the chance to our children to fully comprehend what’s surrounding them.

Along with many other parents and educators, I am still wondering why media literacy is not becoming central as math or English literacy in the primary school’s curriculum. Despite the MediaSmart initiative being launched a few years ago in UK, there is still a lot to be done in terms of efficacy, involvement and reach: year by year, we watch the “media and marketing machine” becoming ever more sophisticated, putting an ever increasing pressure on our kids, but – at part from the occasional protest or bewilderment – we don’t offer solutions, failing to act urgently on the issue.

Our children are left behind, wondering about this constant carousel of messages and images, gathering important clues from them, probably constructing their own identity, aspirations and fears around them…it is such a disfavour we are inflicting on our society not to act with urgency on this issue.

Back to the documentary. I am including both links: the first link is for the short trailer in You Tube while the second is the movie full length in low resolution (watchable as a demo from the distributor’s website).

Happy (well…probably NOT SO HAPPY…) watching! 🙂