Quick notes from Monday

[jlh]

Don't you love it when Colbert screws with WikipediaWhat I find most interesting about these Equus promotional photos is that despite all the blah blah blah about the play being quite serious in how nudity is used (all true) the producers have clearly decided to sell it as "see Dan Radcliffe in his debut as teenage heartthrob, naked with a horse

Comments

[sistermagpie]

It's kind of fascinating the difference that Clio brings up, that men can openly ogle underaged girls while women always have to act shocked at this sort of thing. (I remember seeing an interview with Elijah Wood for Fellowship of the Ring and it was on Regis and Kelly or something that the main topic seemed to be that he had facial hair. Granted EW is one of those young men who has imo misguided facial hair, but still.) It's like women always have to say, "How could YOU have facial hair? Or body hair? Or secondary sex characteristics! You're that cute little boy who was David Copperfield!"

While men openly reject the younger version: "The Olson Twins. Who knew they'd grow up to be hot (and therefore worth something). They used to look like Monchichi."

I think that also plays into why it's sometimes harder for a boy child star to make it as an adult than a girl. If the girl at least has breasts they can sort of make her up to be sexy. Where as with boys it's like often there's too much of a difference between the child self and the adult self. The ones that are more successful tend to be the kind of men who retain their same look--which means they sort of look childish when they're adults and are usually character actors (and often relatively small).

[black_dog]

I think there may be a gender difference, too, in whether people perceive objectification as threatening and something that should be shamed and discouraged or just, you know, kind of a weird, fun thing about the world if you take it for what it's worth. I'm thinking of that scene in American Pie where the hero wakes up and he's been "used" for sex, hooray!

About aging child stars -- I'm just sort of speculating, but I wonder if there's a difference in the way male and female faces age from childhood, especially the type of face that is considered ideal for a child actor. A lot of male child stars end up as funny-looking adults -- think Macauley Culkin for instance. It may be that the features that make for "ideal" photogenic proportions in a boy actor -- big eyes, unusually distinct features -- just turn out oddly when the person is fully grown. This may be less true of girl actresses because they're not selected for faces that are quite so cartoonish.

[sistermagpie]

Yes, I do think there's a big differences in the faces of males and females...though I think it may also be that women's faces are also admired for being more childlike. So if big eyes are cute in child stars, they are also more likely to be attractive in an adult woman.

I also think women's faces sometimes don't change in the same way. It's sort of like voices, to me. A woman's voice is different than the voice she had as a little girl, but it's not like with a boy where he's got one voice, and then it breaks, and suddenly he's literally got somebody else's voice. Remember Daniel Radcliffe in CoS? I think sometimes their faces are the same way. Rather than just sort of getting steadily older, some boys go through what to me seems like a more violent kind of puberty where their faces are more like silly putty. To use HP kids as an example, Daniel Radcliffe is more the child star who to me looks the same as an adult. Tom Felton had a silly putty face and body. He was really young for a while, then shot up. I remember a friend of mine saw CoS and said it was confusing because his face looked different in every scene. I remember one person being surprised that it was the same actor in the later movies.

I guess it sometimes just comes down to sexy women always being expected to have something in common with little girls, while it's men aren't quite the same way. A woman in a girl's school uniform is sexy; a man in short pants and a boy's school uniform can be silly. You've got a much better chance of getting a little girl star who grows up into a viable sex object than banking on a little boy. For boys it seems like you're mostly better at least starting when they're adolescent.

[black_dog]

You're right, it's obviously a much more dramatic phase-transition for boys; no one talks about a boy having "suddenly grown up before I'd even noticed." :) Which I guess is why a "man in short pants and a school uniform" is so definitively on the wrong side of the barrier, so definitively de-sexualized (or kinkified, I suppose!) But there's still something weird, to me, about the idea of "childlike" women being hot. That whole super-skinny thing, for instance -- it's almost a cliche to point out how historically anomalous it is as an ideal.

[jlh]

I wonder how much of it has to do with the taboo against women perving on men in general, and how much of it has to do with the maternal incest taboo being stronger than the paternal one, and how much of it has to do with seeing all women as already potentially maternal. I see all these women doing the math to say, he is young enough to be my son, but I never see men doing that. And it's all ironic since when we think "sexual predator" we think older man, young girls, and maybe that's because that border is so fucked up, we're so aware of how sexualized young girls are, how our sexual ideal is really pretty much a 15-year-old girl.

But the marked difference for boys growing up is valid, esp in their faces. I'm trying to think of male child stars who weren't baby faced adults and all I'm getting is Seth Green, maybe River Phoenix. Though Leo seems to be growing out of it now.

[black_dog]

In Dan's case the anxiety in fandom seems to focus specifically on his age, though -- fandom is awfully good at overcoming any general taboo against women perving on men. :)

Interesting about the incest taboos -- I suspect they work differently in the two cases. I suppose a father's protectiveness of his daughters is based on an acute awareness of their sexual potential -- he's hypervigilant because he thinks it's "natural" in some sense for other men to want them sexually and to exploit them in a way that would be harmful to them. I wonder if the maternal taboo works the same way, because the vibe I get from some of the Dan comments seems based on a rejection or discomfort with his sexuality itself, a preference to continue seeing him as a child. Otherwise, of course, there's traditionally less of a sense that early sexual experience is harmful to a boy, compared to a girl (unless it's homosexual experience, which supposedly would skew his normative long-term sexual development.)

So the women who feel really squicked by seeing Dan sexualized (I'm not talking about the ones who simply don't find him sexy) don't seem to be protecting Dan, it seems to be about something else, maybe. And I don't really feel sure about what that "something else" could be. I'd trust your intuitions much more than mine, here. Could there be an uneasy mix of desire/transgression about being a mature and psycholgically dominant woman who captures and "tames" a boy's sexuality before it can develop into something more independent and threatening? Is there some secret shame about the "Mrs. Robinson" role, so that falling into it would feel like an emotional failure or a form of immaturity? Do people just feel freaked out about how the boy/man transition reflects the passage of time, reminds them of everyone's inevitable aging? I'm out of my depth here, I just don't know.

[sistermagpie]

I was going to say the same thing. It seems like women either do or know they're expected to relate to little boys in a different way, and that makes a difference. Men are happy ignoring little girls unless they are their daughters, and then once they hit puberty they're acceptable sex objects.

Women more generally value the child, which is why they can squee over these boys no matter what age they are. They can think Dan's adorable and then think he's adorable in a different way. (My mother called me today to ask if I'd seen Extras and was all about "When did he get so big?") It's almost easier if you don't care or notice until it's a sex object. For the women first they're maternal and then they're like quasi-maternal with all the figuring out of how much older they are and all that.

And it's true it's ironic that BD talked about lust being threatening, but it depends on who it's threatening to. If women are weirded out by it they seem to be threatened about their own lust if they're not sure about the object being appropriate. But the male lust for young girls is probably a lot more threatening in reality.