Aisha Sultan wonders about our obsession with sexy little girls in her column in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "University of Iowa professor M. Gigi Durham has written an excellent analysis on our culture's pervasive fascination with little girls: The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. In the book, which should be required reading for parents, Durham argues that there is a link between the constant stream of highly sexualized images of young girls in the media and the increase in child pornography and sexual violence against young girls and women worldwide. While one may not explicitly cause the other, she writes, sexualizing young girls to sell movies, TV shows, magazines and clothes makes it an acceptable part of mainstream culture."
