Was meddling Mary Whitehouse right about sex on TV all along?
The name Dan Schneider probably doesn’t ring any bells for most people; but if they have children of a certain age they’re almost certainly familiar with his work. He was the showrunner for US children’s TV network Nickelodeon and helped notch up a string of successful shows in the Noughties aimed at that awkward age between pre-adolescence and teens.
His hits included Zoey 101, starring Britney’s sister Jamie Lynn Spears, and Victorious, which introduced a young Ariana Grande to the world.
A new documentary, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, has now exposed the often toxic working environment on Nickelodeon in those years, which included bullying of junior members of staff, and even allegations of child sexual abuse — though not by Dan Schneider himself.
None of this is altogether surprising. Certain kinds of men will exploit positions of power for sexual kicks.
What’s odd is that it took until 2024 for anyone to apparently notice how, as The Guardian put it last week, “children were asked to perform material laced with what now looks like startlingly crass sexual innuendo”.
It doesn’t go into detail, but one episode of Victorious centred on a wind machine that was praised, in nudgenudge wink-wink fashion, for its ability to “not only blow, but suck”.
Another featured a teenage girl being asked suggestively: “Would you like a sausage? Here’s a nice fat one.” Subtle it wasn’t.
Underage female stars were also regularly put into scenes requiring them to frolic around wearing bikinis.
The Guardian asks plaintively:
“How was this stuff ever broadcast?” It’s a good question.
It was a question that many people were asking openly at the time. Unfortunately, anyone who did raise concerns about the increasingly sexualised content being presented to girls in particular through television, music and fashion was dismissed as a reactionary or a prude.
Psychologist Linda Papadopoulos undertook a year-long consultation into the problem on behalf of the UK’s Home Office back in 2010, resulting in a report titled Sexualisation of Young People, which warned against “a blurring of the lines between sexual maturity and immaturity” that “effectively legitimises the notion that children can be related to as sexual objects”.
Many of her findings were brushed off by progressive critics as puritanical hysteria. Some academics said she hadn’t understood that innocence and experience are not fixed but fluid states of being; and that children were able to view “sexy, sexual, sexually implicit or even pornographic materials” in nuanced ways.
That children are media savvy isn’t in doubt. But the issue isn’t whether they can resist such hidden messages, but why these are there at all. What if these have been purposefully inserted into the culture by adults in ways that echo child sexual-grooming?
That implication was raised bluntly by a report in Australia around the same time with the deliberately provocative title Corporate Paedophilia.
It spoke of how big business was selling “paedophiliac chic” from girls’ pants with the word “Juicy” emblazoned across the backside to advertising that put children into sexual poses that mimicked pornography.
This pressure on children to act “sexy” was a new phenomenon, the Australian authors argued, saying it “is essential to ask whose interests such sexualisation serves and at whose expense it occurs”.
Again, these concerns were largely brushed off by the “let-it-all-hang-out” brigade, who concluded that anyone who was worried about what was happening must simply be trying to “stop information getting out”.
“Children are in danger of losing their sexuality and the right to own it,” one detractor even complained. Little has changed in that respect. In Ireland, criticism of some of the sexually explicit books available in libraries and schools, which show, for example, how to use hook-up apps or which go into detail about certain sexual practices, is similarly dismissed as a proxy for not wanting children to have the essential, empowering knowledge to which they’re entitled.
The same goes for protests against events which see children being read stories by drag queens with overt sexual personas or for objections to what the “sex and relationships” components of the new draft primary school curriculum currently under consultation might usher in down the line.
All these concerns are sweepingly belittled in identical language.
But if some are now admitting they were slow on the uptake when it came to not picking up on the sexualised content in Nickelodeon shows — or, worse, didn’t see anything wrong with such material being targeted at children — then mightn’t it be wise for them to listen to what the people who did identify the problem when it was happening are warning about now?
For his part, Schneider has apologised for the toxic working culture during his time at Nickelodeon.
As for the creepy sexualised content of his shows, though, he concedes it was inappropriate, but points out that dozens of other creatively gifted adults were involved in the production of those programmes and said no one higher up ever told him to stop.
The shows were simply too successful or his bosses neither noticed nor cared about the sexual subtexts.
We should listen to the ones who were right early on about child sexualisation, rather than those who said all was OK
The bottom line always wins out; and that, ironically, is another thing about which that pantomime villain of yesteryear Mary Whitehouse, with her much-mocked Clean Up TV Campaign, never had any illusions.
She was warning about the danger of “corporate paedophilia” long before the Australians put a label to it. She’d have seen Zoey 101 and Victorious for what these shows were. Whitehouse also saw what was coming down the tracks as technology advanced. She died in 2001 before the first iPhone was ever made, but would not have been surprised by how phones are now used to target children.
It must be painful for those who consider themselves a cut above intellectually to suddenly realise — shock, horror — that priggish conservatives may have been right all along; but of course they have no intention of conceding they were wrong anyway.
Instead those in Ireland who express concerns about the sexual propaganda being drip-fed to children will still be tarred as belonging to a burgeoning “far right”, a term which conveniently covers everyone from religious diehards to radical feminists.
The aforementioned Australian report was published by a thinktank that is socially conservative but politically and economically to the left. That’s a community not yet catered for by any major Irish party.
The least the new taoiseach should do when he takes up his job is to instruct ministers to stop lazily slandering everyone who expresses such concerns as if they were beyond the pale. Ideas are hard to suppress if they keep turning out to be true.