Britain’s sexualised society has caused two middle-class girls to become call girls and sell their bodies to football stars, a children’s author says.
Bel Mooney, writing in the Daily Mail, attacked popular culture that promotes female promiscuity as ’empowerment’ and perpetuates the ‘happy hooker’ myth.
She also warned about the ‘pornification’ of teenage boys whose attitude to sex comes from viewing pornography on the internet.
Gutter
The coalition Government has promised to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of Britain’s children.
Bel Mooney said: “Little by little, the gutter has become the cultural main street”.
She added: “As a children’s author, I have found myself in many schools over the past 25 years and noticed one significant change — nowadays, girls of ten and over seem to have grown up far too quickly.
Sleaze
“So many aspects of popular culture — from fashion, to pop lyrics and videos, to advertising, through to TV programmes like Big Brother and The X Factor — peddle a combined message of sleaze and greed.
“This corrupting influence is very hard to avoid. Once, a little girl might have wanted to be a teacher or a doctor (and of course, many still do), but now, sadly, she is likely to say she wants to be a model, a pop star or a WAG.
“The most frequent answer I get, when I ask little girls what their ambitions are, is: ‘I want to be famous.'”
Myth
She also hit out at those who push a glamorised view of prostitution.
She said: “In the UK alone, 75 per cent of prostitutes started when still under-age, nearly three-quarters of all British prostitutes were at some point in care, and nearly half have suffered sexual abuse — with far more than that having suffered physical abuse within their families.
“Yet the ‘happy hooker’ myth (think Pretty Woman and Belle de Jour) continues to persist, and it seems that an increasing number of middle-class teenage girls find it exciting, rather than shocking or dangerous.”
She added: “To be honest, I’ve grown tired of feminists who defend so-called ‘sex workers’ on the grounds that what they do is somehow ’empowering’. It is not.”