LGBT Book & Video Blog

Last Halloween, a 5-year-old girl dressed as a Bratz doll showed up at Gigi Durham's front door. Wearing a gauzy miniskirt and a tube top, the child tottered on platform shoes while carrying the doll that had inspired her racy get-up. "I had an instant dizzying flashback to an image of a child prostitute I had seen in Cambodia, dressed in a disturbingly similar outfit," Durham, a professor at the University of Iowa, writes in her new book, "The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It."

Playing dress-up is a normal part of childhood. But simply test-driving mommy's high heels now has to compete with sexually suggestive pint-size products from pole-dancing kits sold in the toy section to "Hooters Girl (in training)" T-shirts for toddlers to padded bras for 6-year-olds. And that's all long before the tweens and teens, where girls face the dizzying contradictions of a popular culture that salivates over youth and tells them "if you've got it, flaunt it," while sexual education in school, if it exists at all, too often consists of preaching "abstinence only."

In her new book, M. Gigi Durham, who heads the Iowa Center for Communication Study at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, critiques the many ways that young girls' sexuality is shaped and exploited by a marketplace where younger is better and the line between child porn and art gets ever blurrier. Durham, a self-described pro-sex feminist, also leads workshops in media literacy in schools, aiming to give kids the tools to critique the sexual images and myths that are being promoted to them.

Salon spoke with Durham, who is the mother of two daughters, ages 7 and 10, by

phone at her office at the University of Iowa. Listen to the interview here. Read it @ Pushing grown-up sexuality on kids

By Katharine Mieszkowski