The Sexual Exploitation of Children in Film: A deep dive
Sara Piper |16 April 2023|WWYW News Bulletin
We’ve all been told a million times by now that the screen does not reflect real life. Films are fiction, social media is a fantasy, and media reporting on celebrities is a fabrication. But this knowledge doesn’t stop us, the viewing public, from allowing pop culture and media to shape the way we see the world. Sometimes it’s harmless daydreaming: who can honestly say they haven’t dreamed of having a closet like Paris Hilton’s? However, the way that young stars have been sexualised on screen, and the media’s reporting on them as desirable, sexual beings before they’re anywhere near the of consent has throughout history created an immensely dangerous climate for children women to grow up in.
To fully understand the scope of the treatment of children on and off the screen we need to go all the way back to the beginning of film.
1921: the spectacle that is the motion picture is a mere 25 years old, and stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin are dominating at the box office. In fact, when the latter wrote his smash hit The Kid that year, the film was responsible for creating the first-ever child star. Jackie Coogan starred alongside Chaplin at the age of seven and immediately shot to stardom, having his image merchandised onto countless products from action figures to peanut butter. But being the first child star to experience stardom, he was also the first to experience firsthand the sickening fascination with childhood and immaturity shared by filmmakers and audiences alike. Coogan recounts a conversation with early film mogul Louis B Meyer (so much more on him later!), in which Mayer claimed that “puberty is sickening” and Coogan was “disgusting for experiencing it”. Mayer’s words highlight a disturbing pattern that has followed us to this day in which the viewing public never wants to see their young stars grow up.
No one in the history of film exemplifies this sentiment more than Shirley Temple. Temple’s first onscreen appearance was at age three in a series of shorts entitled “Baby Burlesks”, in which toddlers are put in ‘adult scenarios’ complete with costumes and visible diapers. One short depicted Temple as a ‘political mistress’ sent to keep the baby president ‘company’ while dressed in a black corset and a string of pearls. In another, she is a ‘working gal’ trading lollipops for hugs with two soldiers in yet another corset. Both shorts contain shots of the children kissing and touching one another, and using suggestive language.
Not to mention Temple’s infamous rendition of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in 1934, in which she is surrounded by and in the arms of at least a dozen grown men, all the while sucking on multiple lollipops. As a modern audience we watch on with detached disgust, and we say “that would never happen today”, but how different is this, really, from this scene of a teenaged Ariana Grande released by Nickelodeon just 10 years ago?
Temple later recalled in her memoir the “cynical exploitation of our childhood innocence” she faced during her time in Hollywood, and the clip of Grande provides just one example of the way nothing has changed in the last 100 years. Further, here are just a few quotes released about Temple, all of which when she was under 10 years old:
“she is a complete totsy… watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity”
“middle aged men and clergymen alike respond to… her well-shaped and desirable little body”
Audiences were responding to the way Temple appeared on screen, and the print media fed their disturbing obsession. Temple went on to sue the journalist who made the above statement, but the damage was already done: from age three, audience were looking at her through a lens of desire, and what’s worse is that they have not learned better since then.
Similarly made into a spectacle by the media in her youth was Judy Garland. Garland was born into a showbiz family, and had been appearing on vaudeville stages since she could stand. Her big break came when she caught the eye of an executive at Metro Goldwyn Mayer: MGM was known for their vibrant family-friendly films, and already had scores of young performers under contract. Studio head Louis B Meyer was a well-known figure in Hollywood who could turn anyone into a star overnight.
Garland found fame starring alongside fellow child star Mickey Rooney in the immensely popular ‘Andy Hardy’ film series, in which she portrayed the loveable but ultimately friendzoned companion to the ‘girl-crazy’ Andy Hardy, but behind the scenes were a much different story. From her first day at MGM there was a deep scrutiny on Judy’s prepubescent body: as she grew there was an expectation that Judy would retain the body of a child, and was thus corseted, her chest was bound, and she was forced into a dangerous diet assisted by amphetamines. Once she landed her infamous role as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the hyperfocus on her body in the media only grew. Despite being a petite woman, Garland was labelled as “dumpy” and overweight, and Louis B Meyer famously referred to her as his “little hunchback”. She recalls being frequently groped by Meyer under the pretence of “touching her heart”, and she faced constant sexual harassment at the hands of her Wizard of Oz costars. Newspapers splashed headlines about “Judy the Fat Kid”, and her “life of drugs, disease, and divorce”. The media’s fascination with Garland’s so called ‘decline’ from innocent child star to troubled adult struggling with substance abuse and eating disorders is all-too-familiar. Tabloids reporting on the underage Olson Twins directly mirrors widespread public opinion of a young Garland.
The Olsen Twins, like Garland, lived in the public eye since they were babies. Despite being well-known as child performers, they were constantly sexualised in the media: In a 2003 Rolling Stone article entitled “The Sisters of Perpetual Abstinence”, journalist Jacee Dunn asked the 17-year olds if they “still had their v-cards”, and what their plans were to “lose it”. Further, a website emerged “counting down” to their 18th birthday, boasting “find out if the twins are legal already in your state! Avoid pesky jail time”. This echoed the experience of teen Natalie Portman, who recalls a radio station “counting down ‘til she’s legal!”. Portman also speaks of receiving “rape fantasy fan mail” at age 13. Clearly, the media’s words were resonating with their audiences. “Being sexualised as a child I think it took away from my own sexuality because it made me afraid” states Portman.
Tragically, Portman was just following in the footsteps of the countless children that came before her. Brooke Shields, for example, was photographed for Playboy at age 10. She appeared naked on film at age 11 as a prostitute in 1978’s Pretty Baby (pictured below), and again at 15. Behind the scenes of the latter film, 1980’s Blue Lagoon, Shields was encouraged by producers to enter into a sexual relationship with her 18-year old costar. Just as the relationship between 17 year old actress Deanna Durbin and 38 year old Joseph Cotton was celebrated 40 years prior. And the relationship between a 17 year old Demi Lovato and 29 year old Wilder Valderrama was overlooked 30 years later.
The portrayal of children on screen has historically been controlled by serial predators. From Louis B Meyer, all the way to Nickelodeon’s Dan Schneider, and countless in between, predators have been protected by their studios and given a platform to shape the way that audiences view children. Speaking of her time on Nickelodeon, actress Alexa Nikolas (pictured below) stated “To me, he is the creator of childhood trauma. He played a huge role in my personal childhood trauma. I did not feel safe around Dan Schneider while working at Nickelodeon.”
The exploitation of children on film is a tradition as old as film itself. The way that film, tv, and the media presents children as objects of desire has created a dangerous and traumatic landscape not only for the child stars they are exploiting, but also for all children who grow up with so many of these images that they become normalised. There are no doubt stories of other child stars running through your head right now, and I wish it were possible to dissect the experiences of each and every one in this article: the Drew Barrymore’s, the Jeanette McCurdy’s, the Amanda Bynes’, the Corey Feldman’s, the thousands of others who experienced the trauma of growing up in the showbiz industry but never found fame. All of these stories deserve to be heard, and I encourage you to seek out just a few, in hopes that we can all start to deconstruct the way we have been conditioned since childhood to accept the sexual exploitation of children on our screens, our magazine covers, our social media, as the inevitable norm. Films may be fiction, but their consequences have, and will continue to be, very real.
