Today in “On the Square,” Mary Rose Somarriba describes A Girl’s Life in the Cyberbubble . The sexualization of children, she writes,
seems to be affecting girls more than boys, and sexualization is different from healthy sexuality. As Sax sees it, girls who dress sexy “prior to the onset of puberty are not expressing their sexuality. . . . Dressing sexually in the absence of sexual desire is simply conformism.”
Which has, she continues, an unexpected result: “As psychology professor Stephen Hinshaw of Berkekley sees it, ‘If girls pretend to be sexual before they are sexual, they’re going to find it much, much harder to connect to their own sexual feelings.’” And it has other results, which she goes on to describe.
