Getting Real: Challenging The Sexualisation Of Girls

Introduction:
Today young women have embraced their own degrading objectification. Seeming to have abandoned the hope of real equality with men, women and girls enact prostitution. Pole dancing, once the exclusive province of women in strip clubs, has moved to women’s homes and exercise classes. Lap dancing and pole dancing have become mainstreamed as women’s and girl’s sexuality.
– Melinda Tankard Reist, Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (2009).
Women moving through everyday life are aware that, it's not an unknown phenomenon for women to have encountered undesired sexual harrying. The traditional answer of sexual harrying focuses on the ways in which men are socialised to value the sexual experiences of women and their
Look at porn stars, and look how an average girl now looks. It has seeped into everyday: fake breasts, fuck-me shoes ...We are hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired. They want to please at any cost.”
– Linda Papadopoulos, author of the Home Office Report to the British Government (2010). The constant hypersexualisation creates unhealthy implications as the threat of sexualisation on behaviour can source pathological outcomes that are influential on behavioural, cognitive and emotional, therefore in doing so controls aspirations and inhibits interpersonal relationships in the present and future, (Egan and Hawkes 2007, 2010; Duschinsky 2011; Renold and Ringrose 2012).
Creating the notion that advances from men, even from an early age is approachable; this is demonstrated with a question from Emma Rush, ‘[I] is it wise to actively encourage girls of primary school age to have romantic fantasies about older men? How do we then expect them to behave if an older man approaches apparently offering romance’ (Rush 2006), consequently even from a young age girls are socialised into thinking unwanted conduct of behaviour from men are normal behaviour of the other gender, they are being influenced into the myth of gender oppression by the other gender, from an already very young
The second process was to generating initial codes, list of items from the data set that have reoccurring pattern, this is a systematic way of organising and gaining meaningful insight into parts of the data in relation to my research aims and questions. This process is quite cyclical and it involves going back and forth between phrases through the process annotating and transcribing the text to investigate for explicit (shallow) and hidden meanings in the text that will help to build the foundation for these women experiences. This then would be collapsed into clusters and these clusters would build their way to form overarching themes. This process of finding codes is continuous as the codes needs to be refined so adding; splitting of the codes is to be expected. Coding the data is a process of breaking (decontextualizing and recontextualizing) to help reduce and expand the data into new ways and theories, this then allows for temporary answers about the relationship between the data to be formed. Asking questions such as “what is this text saying” taking into account information that is also omitted from the data, the linguistic language used, literal terms, action are all factors taken into account when coding the