Ugh: Study Shows Young Girls Increasingly Aspire To Be “Sexy”

And now, for something truly depressing: A new academic study on girls ages 6 to 9 shows the overwhelming majority “are thinking of selves as sex objects.”

This disturbing new finding was published in the journal Sex Roles, according to CBS Local. In the study, the girls were presented with two dolls, one “sexy” and one “non-sexy.” (Think Bratz versus American Girls.) Researchers than asked the girls to say which doll “represented how they themselves wanted to look” and which doll they thought would be more popular. And — I’m sure you can see this coming — 68 percent wanted to look like the “sexy” doll, while 72 percent said the “sexy” doll would be more popular than the “non-sexy” doll. Just to reiterate, the girls in this study were ages 6 through 9. Sad.

Even more frustratingly, researchers found that girls with limited access to media (i.e., kids with parents who don’t make Toddlers & Tiaras regular viewing) were more likely, in some cases, to pick the sexualized doll, in a trend researchers described as the “forbidden fruit” syndrome. Can anyone win here?

Screenshot from Toddlers & Tiaras website.

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