The blogosphere has had quite a reaction to this image, originally posted in an article on Gizmodo:
Brett Singer wrote an interesting response to the image on ParentDish, and the article prompted some fervent discussion. While I think the image is a hoax, I’d like to consider some of the implications of its being real or not real.If the image is a hoax, the obvious question is: why would anyone perpetrate such a hoax? Perhaps it was a crude attempt at a “comic” homage to an actual product that was featured on Gizmodo several years ago:
The similarities (location of floor lights, height of the pole relative to the doll, disco ball, location of the “pole dancer” label) are striking. Perhaps the pole dancer toy was an experiment to see how bloggers and news outlets would respond. This image has certainly hit the mainstream, as this New York Post article proves. If this was some sort of social experiment, designed to guage America’s response to such an unsettling image, it has been fairly successful.
But what should we make of our collective response? Singer says, “Even if the Pole Dance doll turns out to be fake, the real problem is how easy it is to believe that it’s real.” I disagree. No one writing about the doll ever asserts that it’s real. The original Gizmodo article is dubious, and the Post simply points out that the photo is controversial. Even Singer’s article ends with the questions: “What do you think? Is the pole-dancing doll real?”
What if the pole dancing doll were real, however? This is where things get complicated for me. While I agree that even the hint of sexualizing young children should worry us, I wonder how different a pole dancing doll is from the kind of child objectification we see routinely on television shows like Toddlers & Tiaras. And lest we blame t.v., let’s remember that TLC is merely documenting (as much as any reality television show is truly documentary) a real-life phenomenon.
I also wonder how the lookism encouraged by a doll like the pole dancer (if she exists) is substantively different from the lookism Mattel has been promoting for 50 years with Barbie, or that myriad dolls and toys aimed at America’s girls have fostered for decades. Pole-dancing girl looks an awful lot like pretty much every other doll: she has long hair, large eyes, and a perfect complexion and wears a satin “princess” dress.
Don’t get me wrong: context matters. A lot. The act of dancing, even fully clothed, around a pole that suggests a stripper’s pole (we seldom use the phrase “pole dancing” to refer to dancing around a maypole, for example) carries with it powerful sexual symbolism. I don’t want to minimize the fact that this doll, if real, places the girl who identifies with her in a “fantasy” scenario that almost any sane person would consider inappropriate for any child.
But while authors like Singer decry other instances of “stripper” behavior in girls and young women (the Cyrus daughters most recently and notably), I wonder if the problem isn’t that girls might want to attempt to embody adulthood in a way that’s potentially sexual but rather that aspiring to stripperhood means that one’s ultimate goal is to be gazed upon. After all, systematic reinforcement of the male gaze as a cultural norm is what makes disrobing for money a viable career option for women.
I’m struck by a moment almost exactly 1 minute into the YouTube video of Noah Cyrus’ “pole” dance at the Teen Choice Awards pre-show party. While the girls whirl around the pole-of-controversy, a group of boys dance on another part of the stage. The boys interact with one another, one boy slapping another boy’s foot to send him into a spin, another boy patting his dance partner on his back. No one is watching the boys (except the other boys involved in the dance). The girls could be dancing around a totem pole and they would still be the objects of the audience’s gaze. That they invite such scrutiny, even at such an early age–and that observers seem to be uncritical about that troublesome fact–says more to me about gender in American culture than a definitely inappropriate but probably-fake doll might.
I am bothered in that we continue to blur the lines between adult and child. This seems more acute with the sexualization of young girls. Whether the child doll is real or not doesn’t negate that idea that it is pedophiliac in nature. Some spoofs are just not okay.
Inside a novelty store with all sorts of joke and spoof items the original pole dancer doll would not seem like such a bad thing. In isolation it takes on a more misogynist meaning. I could have a similar reaction to some gay novelty dolls. In a shop in West Hollywood, they are funny to me. There are other environments where I believe they might not be.