Most women can remember the moment they realised their bodies were no longer purely bodies, at least not in the way our male classmates’ were.
I was still in primary school when I started being bullied for being flat-chested. I was horrified at the time, convinced something was wrong with me, all because I, unsurprisingly, given my age, had the body of a child. Luckily for me, I thought then, there were padded bras in my local Tammy Girl. I was incensed when my mum (rightfully) refused to buy me one, instead opting for a soft, wireless triangle bra with dainty yellow trim that irritated my 11-year-old skin and left an angry red rash.
Like most young girls, I grew up desperate to be older than my years, only to find that once I got to that sanctified age, the messaging changed: I’d soon be past my prime. As a teenager, I saw the way my body had begun to be noticed. Skirts had to be a certain length, vest tops had to be worn under our Airtex polo shirts because, in certain lights, bras might be visible, and this, we were told, would be “distracting.”
Britney Spears holds a doll of herself in the schoolgirl outfit from “…Baby One More Time”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Long before we were women, we were treated as if we were, all the while being fed the idea that schoolgirls were the ultimate fantasy. I was eight when “…Baby One More Time” was unleashed onto the world, but the trope of the ‘naughty schoolgirl’ was so pervasive that 10 years later, girls at college, practically still schoolgirls themselves, were buying Anne Summers outfits to dress as “sexy schoolgirls” for Halloween. Meanwhile, in actual classrooms, we were being told to tone down our outfits. The messaging was confusing. No wonder “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” struck such a chord.
So when reports emerged that Shein, the ultra-fast fashion giant, had hosted childlike sex dolls on its marketplace, prompting backlash and regulatory scrutiny, the reaction was shock, but not exactly surprise. The French consumer watchdog describes the dolls as leaving “little doubt as to the child pornography nature of the content.” The dolls have since been removed, and the company says it is cooperating with investigations. This week, it was announced that the European Union has launched a formal investigation into possible breaches of digital law, including the sale of those childlike sex dolls, as well as the “addictive design” of Shein’s platform.
The European Commission’s investigation has been met with applause, and yet, the deeper issue lingers.
We live in a society that simultaneously infantilises and eroticises girls. Entire media tropes are built around the idea that youthfulness is the ultimate form of desirability. And it’s not just Shein. On Erobella, Europe’s fastest-growing erotic tech portal, of the four most popular pre-made AI girlfriends on the site, two are listed as teenagers.
The hyper-sexualised schoolgirl isn’t an internet invention, either. “Teen” consistently ranks among the most searched categories on major porn sites, but its implications go far beyond fantasy. Studies suggest that so-called “barely legal” content, while featuring performers who are adults, can operate psychologically in ways similar to virtual depictions of minors. By repeatedly presenting sexualised depictions of youth, viewers may become desensitised over time, which can lead them to seek out more extreme or boundary-pushing content.
The aesthetic of girlhood; all wide eyes, diminutive frame, softness and, crucially, vulnerability, has long been coded as attractive. Fashion flirts with it (see Kim Kardashian’s Skims “Campus” collection), pornography profits from it, social media filters peddle it, and pop culture does all of the above. “Virtually every cultural product was so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure,” writes Sophie Gilbert in Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.
Kendra Wilkinson of The Girls Next Door performs during MTV’s “Celebrity Rap Superstar” contest in 2007.
(Image credit: Frederick M. Brown via Getty Images)
So why are we still so shocked when the very aesthetic that has been pushed on us for decades then turns up in products designed explicitly for adult sexual consumption?
The controversy surrounding Shein is shocking, but could we really say it’s surprising? It certainly didn’t come from nowhere. For years, we’ve been sold the idea that youthfulness is not just beautiful, but purchasable.
In an Instagram post that has been reshared almost 10,000 times, artist Sam Rueter, contemplating the grief American women are experiencing following the release of the latest batch of Epstein files, writes: “…we have to reckon with the cruel proof of our entire lives being a commodified, fetishized version of girlhood; and we are meeting, all at once, the children we were and could not protect.” Of course, the subject matter (the Epstein scandal) is different, but the throughline is the normalisation of dressing up girlhood for the male gaze. Rueter reflects on childhoods “gone too soon” through “fetishized innocence.”
Shein is, in many ways, the ultimate fast-fashion machine. Algorithm-driven and designed to be hyper-responsive, it produces thousands of new items a day. It was built to give consumers exactly what they want. What the culture persistently signals consumers want is youth. “Our culture teaches us everything,” Gilbert writes.
From the way female celebrities are praised for looking “like a teenager” well into their thirties, to how “anti-ageing” is marketed as empowerment, to the school-uniform styling that has appeared on adult runways for decades — particularly in the Nineties and Noughties, when the sexualisation of girlhood reached an apex — the examples of girlhood being commodified are endless.
Cara Delevingne walks the runway during the 2012 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
(Image credit: Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho via Getty Images)
In 1999, a 17-year-old Britney Spears was splashed across the front of Rolling Stone, reclining on hot-pink satin sheets, cuddling a Teletubby. Inside, page after page was dedicated to sexualised girlish tropes: Britney pushing a bubblegum-pink bicycle with a wicker basket affixed to the front, ‘Baby’ spelt out across the back of her white hotpants in crystals. In another shot, she is styled in a virginal white bra and pants in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by porcelain dolls and stuffed teddies. A replica of Spears’ childhood bedroom is now staged on display at the Kentwood Historical and Cultural Museum. It’s an eerie example of a woman being frozen in time, forever young. Then there were the countless stereotypes that played out on the Victoria’s Secret runway: Kendall Jenner clad in a micro schoolgirl-style kilt, Cara Delevingne twirling a shiny pinwheel. Then in 2017, children as young as five walked in a Victoria’s Secret-style lingerie show in a shopping centre in Chengdu, China’s Sichuan Province.
Kendall Jenner walks the runway at the 2018 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
(Image credit: ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)
Research regularly shows that early sexualisation is linked to anxiety, depression, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating. When girls learn that their value lies in how desirable they appear, it narrows their sense of self. They learn to watch their bodies with a coldly clinical detachment, rather than learning how to just be in their bodies.
Seen through this cultural lens, Shein selling a childlike sex doll seems less like an isolated failure and more like a product of the environment. And yet it would be all too easy to blame a single gross product rather than question how it ever felt marketable in the first place. The sexualisation of girls isn’t the reserve of Shein. It’s not even exclusive to the internet. It happens every day, in playgrounds and boardrooms, in the compliments girls are given and The Substance-style beauty standards women are held to.
Public backlash matters, as does regulatory scrutiny and corporate accountability, but if we treat this as a one-off scandal, a rogue listing that was quickly removed and just as quickly forgotten, we miss the wider reckoning. When algorithms reward hyper-girlish, infantilised aesthetics and society continually eroticises youth, we shouldn’t be shocked when the market monetises that, and the line between celebrating youth and consuming it grows ever blurrier.