Invasion of the prostitots: another moral panic about American girls.

• Author: Howley, Kerry
• Position: Culture & Reviews

Just how far along the slick slope of cultural decline have we slid? While you've been reading The Superficial and watching The Surreal Life, the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls has been hard at work chronicling our sexed-up, dumbed-down culture. The results, cataloged in 72 titillating pages, are yet another worried take on the state of American girlhood.

To anyone engaged with pop culture, the alleged signs of moral descent will be familiar, from dated Kid Rock lyrics to oversexed Disney heroines. But in focusing on very young girls, the APA is innovating. Apparently, we've moved beyond the era of the tatted-up tween and into the day of the prostitot.

Thongs now come in kid sizes. "Pudgy, cuddly, and asexual troll dolls" have been traded for highly gendered "trollz." Even American Girl dolls, paradigms of porcelain chastity, are not immune. "American Girl's recent co-branding with Bath & Body Works," we learn, "may lead to product tie-ins that will encourage girls to develop a precocious body consciousness and one associated with narrowly sexual attractiveness." And let's not even get started on Bratz dolls, billed as "the only girls with a passion for fashion."

The report is short on numbers, but it's easy to be persuaded that 8-year-olds are dressing more like tweens, tweens more like teens, and teens more like 20-somethings. Which means--what, exactly? Kids ape their older peers, and they've never had more access to images of underdressed, clean-shaven celebutants. A sixth-grader in a short skirt could be gesturing toward sexual availability. Or she could be seeking acceptance within a social group, signaling mastery over a shared culture. Are girls dressing for men, or for each other?

It's not a question the APA bothers to address. The authors present the thong crisis beside a litany of pathologies that sexualization might conceivably foster, from depression to addiction. The report skates seamlessly from low self-esteem to violence. Sex abuse "is an extreme form of sexualization," just a few steps away from Trollz on the imagined continuum.

You won't find them in the report, but hard numbers on the state of girlhood abound. The Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual health, reports that the teen pregnancy rate in 2002, the latest year for which data are available, was at its lowest level in three decades. Between 1998 and 2002 the teenage abortion rate dropped 50 percent. In 2002...