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Sex Roles (2009) 60:439441 DOI 10.1007/s11199-008-9536-x
BOOK REVIEW
Media Effects and the Sexualization of Girls
The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. By M. Gigi Durham, Woodstock, New York, The Overlook Press, 2008. 286 pp. $24.95. ISBN 9781590200636
Sharon Lamb
Published online: 7 October 2008# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Its tempting as an academic, when reading a book clearly written for the layperson, to pick it apart for its referencing problems, unsupported statements, and sensationalizing of the topic. But after all, its important to remember that books like these are published under certain expectations of the publisher and editors who want to catch the consumers eye in a bookstore and get the book onto primetime TV talk shows. So I want to begin by saying that The Lolita Effect: Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It is an excellent first book on this topic for the lay reader and that there is a wonderful chapter in it, discussed later in this review, on sexual violence in the media that I intend to use in my undergraduate teaching.
The Lolita Effect is written by M. Gigi Durham, communications/media theorist and researcher, also author of some excellent studies on girls and objectification. It takes its name from the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita (1955) and demonstrates throughout how the image of Lolita is used in the media as a way to project an adult sexuality onto young girls, minimizing the dangers of doing so. The title of the book, however, rings wrong, not only because it takes a phenomenon that others have been studying and ironically puts a different, sexier label on it, but because it also implies that girls share the blame for the phenomenon. This seems especially true when one considers the photo on the cover of the book, the stereotypical blonde, pre-teen beauty, applying lipstick to her lush lips.
In spite of the title and the topic, the argument in the book is generally sound and Durham writes in an interesting and passionate, if not sometimes sensational-
ized, way for parents, teachers, and girls themselves. The book adds dimension to the APA Task Force Report on the...