BY Lux Alptraum
August 14, 2008
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College Candy has a piece ranting against the horrors of tweenophilia, the terrifying craze that’s sweeping the nation. Apparently, tweenophilia is the sexualization of underage ladies (the article specifically mentions fifteen year olds). Leaving aside that young teens aren’t actually tweens (tweens are 8-12 year olds, or preadolescents) — well, we have a few issues with this rant.

It’s not that we disagree with the premise that being overly sexualized and being in the public eye is bad for fifteen year olds: it’s bad for anyone, regardless of age. Sure, we can argue that once you turn eighteen, you’re magically able to handle the pressures of being viewed as a public sex object, of being followed by the paparazzi, of all that attention — it sure worked for Britney Spears!

The thing is, adolescents are not children. They’re not adults, granted — but they are sexual beings, with their own sexual urges and desires. In many ways, there’s not much difference between a sixteen year old and an eighteen year old (and there’s certainly not that much difference between a seventeen year old and an eighteen year old) — except that we’ve stuck this arbitrary boundary that separates the “adults” (and thus okay to be sexualized) from the teens (strictly verboten).

And none of this is to say that adolescents should be treated like adults, because they’re obviously not adults. But the whole teen sex panic thing — the wholesale assumption that the sexualizing of adolescents is wrong, wrong, wrong — well, we just can’t get behind that.

[Photo by Made Underground]