Tesco? hmpf

I was shocked to read in this week's Scottish Socialist Voice about Tesco's selling pole dancing equipment as toys.

"Kids can now enjoy raunch culture too thanks to Tesco, the supermarket behemoth intent on cornering the market in absolutely everything, including infant sexuality. Yes, your pre-pubescent child can now get into pole dancing, once the reserve of sexually abused Las Vegas showgirls, thanks to the Pole Dance Kit! At ‘only’ £49.97, the kit comes complete with extendable chrome pole, a ‘sexy’ dance garter, ‘Peekaboo’ dance dollars and a DVD demonstrating how to move like an exploited sex worker bored out of her mind in a tatty, seedy lap dancing club.

"...laughably [Tesco] insist that the kit is not sexually oriented. Which renders it quite a mystery as to why the product description invites users to “unleash the sex kitten inside”... The sexualisation of young children is big business. Never mind that it can cause emotional distress, body image disorders and premature, unwanted sexual experience; it’s profitable! Next have been at it too, with their ‘So many boys, so little time’ T-shirts... for six year olds. As have Asda, pushing padded bras at...nine year olds."

Tesco have now removed the product from their shelves but it did get me thinking about the sexualisation of childhood. Obviously kids are bombarded with the same images as everyone else and I think they are not immune from the general expectations of being worthless if you're not having sex and all of that - messages we could agree are intended for adults but recieved by everyone.

But more than that, what interests me is the version of sexuality that's being promoted here. Sexist, vapid, visually orientated and therefore voyeuristic - yes, yes, that's all fine but the idea of sexuality as a pre-packaged product, a commodity to be bought and sold... I don't like.

Marx (is this his first mention on this blog? Could be...) talked about commodity fetishism - where human relationships are turned into distinct parcels of definable, gradable, unitary objects. The technical term for this would be reification. All that is intangible becomes solid. All that is fluid turned into concrete.

It's easier to understand concepts like "sex kitten", "frigid", or "porn star" than it is to understand complex social relationships that may shift and turn under your feet, even as you step into them. That's why they are the marketting man's tools of the trade and why they should be the left's anathema.