Nightmare in girl world

“This cheap and nasty experience of sex, if not downright violent and dangerous, does not encourage either the expectation of all the other dimensions of sexual experience that are truly human. Tenderness and intimacy are lost.”

Getting Real identifies not only the role corporations, advertisers and publishers have in feeding and charging up the insatiable nexus between the titillation and expectation within the culture.

It also links the sexualisation of girls to the medicalisation of beauty and what Renate Klein calls the “sickness industry”.

Klein writes: “Sexualisation has already made (young women) dissatisfied with their ‘outside’ bodies, medicalisation now colonises their ‘inside” bodies’ making young women the ‘perfect material’ for the normalisation of the Big Pharm interests such as the normalisation of chemical abortion and contraception, plastic surgery and even anti depressants.”

She adds, “this is where capitalism meets and exploits liberal feminist dreams of girl power”.

In Getting Real, Steve Biddulph writes: “We know intuitively, and sometimes from bitter experiences of our own, that if you hurt someone’s sexuality you hurt their soul.”

Getting Real and its contributors provide an urgently needed book, filled with wise and sharp insights into the recovery of the soul of our own society. Its contents may leave us horrified and ashamed, but its aim is to make us act.