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The missing discourse of development: commentary on Lerum and Dworkin.

Article Excerpt
Lerum and Dworkin provide a provocative interdisciplinary feminist commentary on the Report of the APA (American Psychological Association) Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Although they highlight areas needing further empirical research, as well as deeper feminist theorizing, particularly with regard to the meaning of sexualized images and messages in the media, Lerum and Dworkin fail to address critical developmental issues and make several criticisms of the report that are overstated and miss the mark.

The Need for a Developmental Perspective

Human beings develop cognitively, emotionally, physically, socially, and sexually across the lifespan; this makes it crucial to examine psychological phenomena with a developmental lens. A critical component of the report is its developmental approach, demonstrated in its emphasis on girls as opposed to women, or females generally. The task force highlighted their developmental approach early in the report, maintaining that "the effects of sexualization are likely to vary depending on a girl's age" (APA, 2007, p. 4)--that is, a girl's level of cognitive, emotional, physical, social, and sexual development will shape how she experiences sexualization. For example, as a result of cognitive development, younger children have much more difficulty distinguishing reality from what they see on television and comprehending the intent behind advertising (i.e., they do not understand that people in television commercials are actors who are paid to pretend enjoying a product) than older children, suggesting that they may greatly struggle with the processing and internalization of advertising images or messages (Strasburger, Wilson, & Jordan, 2009; Wilson & Weiss, 1992). Similarly, adolescents, who are in the midst of identity development and highly attuned to sociocultural norms, are particularly impressionable and susceptible to media images and messages about beauty and sexual attractiveness (Strasburger et al., 2009). Other examples of a developmental approach include the report's discussion of age compression as a potential outcome of sexualization, as well as the advocating of comprehensive sexuality education, which is necessarily age appropriate. As developmental psychologists, we applaud the task force's attention to developmental issues.

In contrast, Lerum and Dworkin gloss over human development as if it were irrelevant to the effects of sexualization. In their conflation of girls and women, Lerum and Dworkin treat the process and effects of sexualization as uniform across the lifespan. However, the issues of sexualization are profoundly different...

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