American Female Popstars’ Sexualisation of Young Boys: An Underdiscussed and Harmful Phenomenon
A video has resurfaced online of American popstar Kesha bringing a young boy on stage at a concert, and asking him how old he is. He responds that he is 13, and she hugs him and states: “13. He’s the youngest one I’ve ever abused on stage.” She then sits him down on stage, and says: “This is highly inappropriate what I’m about to do.” A second video shows one of her crew members dressed up as a giant penis, rubbing themselves against him while he is still seated on stage. A third video shows her on stage, laying herself across the lap of a boy who also looks to be an adolescent — with the same giant penis character dancing nearby — and saying to him: “Welcome to puberty.” A fourth video shows her massaging this boy’s chest from behind, with her leg over his shoulder.
A video from one of American popstar Katy Perry’s concerts shows her with a teenage boy on stage; she asks the boy how old he is, and he replies that he is 14. She states: “Oh, so precious.” She asks him if he is nervous, and he nods; she then asks him if he is in school and staying in school, and again he nods. She goes on to ask him if he has ever been kissed, and he shakes his head. She proceeds to give him a kiss on the lips. He looks frozen and uncertain. She says to him: “Honey, when a woman kisses you, you gotta kiss her back”, and points to her cheek. He kisses her cheek, and as he does so, she quickly turns her head around to make him almost accidentally kiss her on the lips.
In the 2006 music video for American popstar Paris Hilton’s song ‘Nothing In This World’, she is shown sensually draping herself over a boy who looks to be around 14, and provocatively dancing around him, in his bedroom. The video revolves around this boy and his attraction to her, and the supposed sexual tension between them. At one point, he is shown spying on her while she is undressing, and she spots him and smiles at him; at another point, she is shown leaning over him with her cleavage exposed and giving him a kiss on the cheek. She continuously touches him and puts her face close to his, while he sits on his bed; as she dances around him on the bed, she has no trousers on and is in stilettoes. The video shows him attending high school; he is listed on the IMDB page for the video as: “Teenage Neighbour”. Hilton was about 25-years-old at the time.
Why This is Harmful Behaviour
This is deeply problematic behaviour in and of itself; adults are exercising control over children within a sexual context. There is an inherent power imbalance here, and children are not able to consent to this type of behaviour as they are not emotionally or intellectually mature enough to properly understand it. Many people think that it is not harmful when adolescent boys are subjected to this behaviour by women who are considered attractive; however, some boys do experience profound emotional trauma in such situations. Moreover, even if in a specific situation a boy does not feel traumatised by the experience, he can often have resultant difficulties later in life. Dr. Tommy Curry, Personal Chair of Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh, has written about black boys who were subject to sexual violations by older females, and has interviewed black men who had these experiences as children. There is a consistent theme where even when the boy did not regard the experience to be harmful at the time, later in life, he acknowledged it as such.
One man stated: “I don’t know if this is negative or not. It certainly sort of created behavior in me that I want to please a woman… I think it did give me some type of self-consciousness… Maybe it’s shaming. Maybe I’m not good enough.” When another man was asked as an adult if he now sees these childhood sexual interactions that he had with an adult woman as manipulative, despite being okay with it at the time, he replied: “Oh certainly. Certainly. Certainly.” Another man was asked if his childhood sexual experience with a much older teenage female babysitter finally registered in his mind as a sexual violation when he first entered adulthood, and he responded: “Not really. Not really, not until, you know, some of the others that happened in my life, and I realized what that was. But during that time I didn’t see it as a violation at all.”
This illustrates how just because being sexualised by an older female might be a fantasy for a boy of a certain age, ultimately the boy is too young to fully understand the implications of what is going on; and that initial feeling of validation does not mean that he won’t be negatively impacted by the experience later in life.
Furthermore, this behaviour is very harmful because, even if the boys in these specific situations have not experienced what they perceive to be harm as a result of these popstars’ actions — and it is impossible to know without asking them — it sends the wrong message within the broader culture. The message that it sends is that it is okay, and in fact desirable, for an adult female who is regarded as attractive to engage in sexual interactions with a young boy. The fact that in the cases of Kesha and Katy Perry, these actions were performed in front of an audience — who are heard in the videos responding with whooping and laughing — reinforces the idea that this is perfectly acceptable behaviour, that it is funny, and that a boy should feel grateful for being at the receiving end of such attention. This can only disempower boys who feel uncomfortable in such situations to report their feelings; it sends the message that if they feel anything other than excited and grateful in these scenarios, there is something wrong with them.
A review on the IMDB page for Hilton’s music video is titled: “Hilarious”, and says: “If you get Paris then you’ll get this video. Scenes of her draping her body over a teenage boy are deliriously parodic. Total gem.” This illustrates how a cultural ramification of this type of behaviour is that an adult woman sexually teasing a young boy is viewed as a source of amusement and fun, rather than as troubling and wrong. If the genders were reversed in this situation, it is likely that there would be little hesitation in people calling it out.
In essence, these scenes in pop culture act to normalise sexually inappropriate behaviour from older females towards boys. Someone might ask: even so, how common is this behaviour ‘in real life’? The answer is that it is impossible to know, as it is significantly underreported (as with all childhood sexual violations, more generally). Noemí Pereda, Georgina Guilera, Maria Forns, and Juana Gómez-Benito have noted that one explanation for why men disclose having endured sexual violations as children at lower rates than women is the possibility of being perceived as “homosexual (if the aggressor was another man) or weak (if the aggressor was a woman), which may combine with the fact that they are more often accused of having provoked the abuse”. In addition, according to the Forensic Psychiatry Institute at St. Josephs Healthcare Hamilton, research has “found that women who sexually abused boys were nearly four times more likely than men to be parents or guardians, including teachers, of their victims. These relationships may contribute to the underreporting of such abuse.” Furthermore, “Women are also less likely than men to use violence, force, or coercion during their sexual abuse. This may contribute to the myth that the sex was consensual or less harmful to the victim. As well, the lack of violence does not fit well with police theories of offending behaviours, which may also contribute to underreporting.”
Sexualisation Within Pop Culture: Women as Victims, Role Models — and Predators?
What is particularly notable is that thus far, there have not been any articles written about this repeated phenomenon of female popstars sexualising young boys. Most critical discussion of sexualised pop culture focuses on the power dynamic of male exploitation of women and girls; which is certainly an extremely important and prominent negative aspect of this culture that needs addressing. For example, Maddy Coy — Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Florida — has written that “Sexualised popular culture… reinforces gender as a hierarchy where women remain defined in terms of the value of their bodies and men are entitled to such bodies for sexual gratification”. She further writes: “We need to be asking questions about the impact of sexualisation for women and girls; for men and boys and how they make sense of it and act in relation to it; and how sexualisation perpetuates stereotypes about masculinity and femininity. This then leads us to conversations about how gendered representations across forms of sexualised popular culture form a ‘conducive context’ (Kelly, 2007) for violence against women and girls (Coy 2009; EVAW 2011a).”
Conversely, writer Clotilde Pedron has argued that while sexualisation of women in pop culture has pandered to “the male gaze” — as in the case of Britney Spears, for example — it could also act as a form of female empowerment; she uses American popstar Sabrina Carpenter as an example of the latter: “While Carpenter appeals to the male gaze, her fan base is mostly women, whom she is primarily performing for. It is the comforting presence of a feminine audience that allows Sabrina’s sensuous performance to be seen as an act of empowerment, since she is in complete control and treats it lightheartedly.” She further quotes model Emily Ratajkowski as arguing that “if being sexualized by society’s gaze is demeaning, there must be a space where women can still be sexual when they choose to be”. At the core of this argument is the idea that when women are in control of their own sexuality, and are acting upon that control not merely to entertain men, this moves from the realm of objectification to the realm of empowerment.
However, what is missing from these discussions is the phenomenon of women in pop culture misusing their sexual agency to harm others. This phenomenon has accompanied the trend of sexualisation in pop culture, which has entailed women being objectified and harmed; that misogynistic form of entertainment has in turn opened up a discussion as to whether this sexualised focus on the female form could actually be used as a form of empowerment. But any discussion of ‘empowerment’ in this regard should take into account the harmful messages that are being transmitted to girls who are privy to such displays, particularly in terms of body image and the notion that their value is inextricably tied to physical appearance; as well as the harm that is inflicted when ‘empowerment’ is viewed as synonymous with ‘exercising power over others, regardless of whether they have consented or can truly consent’. This latter form of harm is evidenced in the cases discussed at the outset of this article, where female popstars have been in a position of sexual control as part of visual entertainment, and have used that control to act inappropriately towards underage boys. This in turn reinforces societal stereotypes about women — that they exist for the purposes of sexual presentation and male pleasure, which forms an environment conducive to violence against women and girls, as Maddy Coy has pointed out. The argument that this is a form of ‘empowerment’ obscures the fact that it is fundamentally part of a capitalistic system wherein individuals personally enrich themselves — through wealth and social validation — at the expense of others.
Feminist author Val Young has pointed out that, although the power that women have often tends to be more constricted than the power that men have, women — like all human beings — “within the limited power that they have, can be abusive, vicious, cruel, possessive, domineering, violent, manipulative, aggressive, dishonest, self-deceptive and criminal.” This seemingly self-evident observation does not appear to have penetrated the broad cultural consciousness, particularly in relation to women engaging in sexually inappropriate actions towards boys.
Kesha, Katy Perry, and Paris Hilton have variously (implicitly or explicitly) wrapped themselves in feminist aesthetics. The lyrics to Kesha’s song, ‘Woman’, read:
“I buy my own things, I pay my own bills
These diamond rings, my automobiles
Everything I got, I bought it
Boys can’t buy my love
[…]
I’m a motherfucking woman, baby, alright
I don’t need a man to be holding me too tight
I’m a motherfucking woman, baby, that’s right
I’m just having fun with my ladies here tonight
[…]
Let’s drive around town in my Cadillac
Girls in the front, boys in the back”
In 2014, Katy Perry was asked on Australian TV if she is a feminist; she replied: “A feminist? Um, yeah, actually. I used to not really understand what that word meant, and now that I do, it just means that I love myself as a female and I also love men.” In 2017, Paris Hilton told Marie Claire that she aligns with the feminist movement, saying: “I just feel it’s about women’s empowerment and girl power, and I’m very into that.” They seem to hold as their standards of ‘empowerment’ the worst behaviours of men; their own previous actions towards boys in many ways mirror the predatory actions traditionally associated with men in relation to girls.
Val Young has observed that women who engage in harmful actions “are the first to exploit feminism, picking out the parts they like (self-empowerment, assertion, the right to be heard and validated) and ignoring the concepts of cooperation, individual boundaries, equality, and respect for others.” In this regard, empathy is paramount; and not just immediate empathy, but long-term empathy. None of these women were mothers at the time, but we often ask men who engage in similar behaviour if they would be happy for such behaviour to be directed towards their daughters. Likewise, these women should have pondered if they would be happy with such behaviour being directed towards their sons. Now that two of them — Katy Perry and Paris Hilton — are mothers, it is worth asking if they still think that their previous actions were acceptable? This is not just something for those individual popstars to have contemplated, but the directors and personnel behind their shows and the music video in question. If the culture is to meaningfully progress, empathy should be extended to all — men and women, boys and girls, without prejudice.
