OPINION: The Problem with “Little Girls Goin’ Hard”

Courtesy TheMarkNews.com

Is it OK for seven- and eight–year-old girls to be taught how to perform “exotic” dance moves, the kind normally associated with pole dancing and raunchy music videos? The parents of children involved with the Orange County dance troupe, Precision Dance, see nothing wrong with their girls performing moves we normally see the likes of Beyoncé doing. They felt compelled to defend their parenting skills after videos that captured the children’s performance were uploaded to YouTube. Various clips of the performance, entitled “Little Girls Goin’ Hard,” have been viewed more than two million times.

After the video started showing up on blogs, the internet exploded; there are already hundreds of thousands of references to the video across websites, blogs, and Facebook pages. In what is now a rather typical sequence of events following a significant occurrence, I first heard about the video when one of my students posted it to Facebook; within hours it was picked up by bloggers; and by the end of the, day local media was covering the story. Two days later, major media outlets decided something worthy of their attention was happening, and the story was picked up by Time, the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, and all the other usual suspects.

At the centre of the controversy is the meaning inherent in the dance moves. The parents of the young performers emphatically denied that their judgment was amiss. One dancer’s mother was nothing less than “shocked” that people would suggest that the children were performing sexually suggestive moves. This is an odd response, one reminiscent of Wall Street executives or oil company representatives defending their integrity before a congressional inquiry.

Any reasonable assessment of the children’s dance cannot avoid the conclusion that many of their moves are the very same forms of erotic gyration and “booty dancing” seen in many music videos. As Sarah Kaufman notes in the Washington Post, “This particular video remake of Beyoncé’s hit “Single Ladies” follows a rubric of raunchy moves straight out of the pole-dance manual . . . Their satin-and-lace hooker look screams Lolita. The whole two-minute display seems one crotch-shot short of illegal. Yet Cory Miller, the bewildered father of one of the girls, defends the dance by claiming that the video was “taken completely out of context.”

What is striking in the midst of this media firestorm is the inability of the parents to see that their children are engaged in what would otherwise be an erotic dance wherein Beyoncé sings, “Got gloss on my lips/A man on my hips/Hold me tighter than my Deréon jeans/Acting up/Drink in my cup/I couldn’t care less what you think.” These parents, along with many in our commercialized culture, fail to understand exactly how badly women have been objectified within the entertainment industry (an industry substantially owned and operated by men). As Allie Townsend describes for readers of Time magazine, the girls’ “raunchy” dance routine constitutes “two minutes of hip thrusts, high kicks, and sensual strutting around a stage.” And I have to agree with Townsend’s conclusion: “Ask me to ‘lighten up’ all you like, but I can see little other to this video than a group of promising little girls asked to take part in something that, at its core, just seems filthy. Children are not yet in possession of their own sexuality, and until they are, it should be protected, not put on parade.”

Now before you accuse me of being a moralizing prude, keep in mind that the issue immediately at hand is not the moral value of pole-dancing or other forms of erotic performance. That issue is separate from the question of what is appropriate for seven- and eight-year-old girls. Some feminist scholars have come to the defence of neo-burlesque dance, and we would be mistaken to simply dismiss all erotica as mere pornography.

The issue here is much simpler. Regardless of whatever the intended meaning of the dance troupe’s performance is, what meanings are viewers likely to give to the performance? When the beleaguered Miller defends his little girl by saying that the dance is being taken out of context, he could not be more wrong. Such a performance gains meaning from the wider social context, and that context makes clear to all that this type of dancing is a prelude to sex, an erotic performance; fundamentally an adult act.

I discuss similar YouTube videos in my book, Watching YouTube, and note that women’s identity is deeply intertwined with commercial media: “YouTube operates as a site where some women perform their objectification within a sexist media culture. Unfortunately, this category of objectified self-representation is densely populated by female tweens and teenagers who mimic the style of self-presentation found in misogynist and racist music videos.” Watching these young girls dance is tantamount to watching them perform their own objectification.

From a very early age, women in consumer society are taught to conform to images of highly sexualized femininity, to measure themselves by the men they attract, and to perform sexually for the pleasure of the male gaze. The young dancers from Orange County are learning that a sexualized performance gains our applause. No, they do not yet understand that they are enacting sexuality, but they will soon enough.

The young girls’ performance is inevitably compared to and evaluated in light of the surrounding music video and dance culture. As Kate Ward notes in Entertainment Weekly, “Even Beyoncé and her back-up dancers were more covered up than this!” The context that Miller and his fellow parents overlook is the ongoing pornographication of mainstream culture.

The styles, codes, and forms of behaviour from a highly eroticized commercial media system are being normalized by mainstream Middle America. Nothing demonstrates this normalization process better than young girls being trained to bust a move that would make a grown woman blush. The parents, the approving audience, and the misguided dance troupe, Precision Dance, all fail to see that they are domesticating the highly erotic codes of commercial culture and training their young girls to seek pleasure by performing their objectification for an audience.

The Mark News is Canada’s online forum for opinion and analysis.