No one in the picture or the audience is sexualizing little girls (or boys). Instead, the outrage is caused by harmful expectations of purity that are imposed on girls and women, but not boys. As well as the current moral panic about pedophilia, which again is unhelpful in actuality protecting children.
Want to protect help children from predators? Help them remove the stigma around their bodies and sex, and empower them to speak and be heard when something they don’t like happens. Failing to do so reinforces the feelings of shame that all too often enable predators to get away with what they do.
And maybe also don’t share potentially embarrassing photos without consent but that’s small potatoes compared to the above issues.
Help them remove the stigma around their bodies and sex, and empower them to speak and be heard when something they don’t like happens.
This. So much this. If auntie wants to give them a kiss and they don’t want to get slobbered then tough fucking luck auntie, I’ll back the little shits up when they bite you. Predators are, by and large, able to do what they do because people don’t teach kids that they do, in fact, have bodily autonomy.
And while I’m at it bodily autonomy of kids also implies that parents don’t parade photos around like some fucking trophy or something. Have some basic fucking regard for your own kids and what they want. How would you feel when they’re showing nude pictures of you to their classmates yeah I thought so.
I like this take. If you get to show photos of your kids naked to your friends, they should have the same privilege.