The blogosphere is full of discussions about Miley Cyrus and her photos in Vanity Fair. I’m surprised by how many writers find nothing wrong with the photo — but then, they didn’t attend a conference on the sexualization of children recently.

With that in mind, here’s some worth reading: At Girl Media Maven, Nancy Gruver has a  great discussion going in the comments of Who’s the Grown Up Here? and a follow-up post where she discusses what all these sexualized images of girls in the media are doing to our girls. And Blue Milk has some terrific visuals to help explain why some of us have been speaking out on this for a while.

This is the kind of conversation I’m hesitant to join, because I feel so bad for this 15-year-old girl, heart of an entertainment franchise, and the life she has ahead of her.

But, Corporate Babysitter that I am, I have to say that there’s one thing missing from this conversation: Disney. Disney owns Miley Cyrus (as lifestyle brand Hannah Montana) to the tune of one billion dollars.

Now, Disney seems to be upset by the photos:

A Disney spokeswoman, Patti McTeague, faulted Vanity Fair for the photo. “Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines,” she said.

Emphasis mine. Disney would know something about creating situations to manipulate kids in order to sell something.

After all, the Disney Princess machine alone is worth four billion dollars (see Disney Reaches to the Crib to Extend Princess Magic, Wall Street Journal).

Disney is arguably the greatest marketed brand ever.

And for their part in the creation of the Miley Cyrus who appears in Vanity Fair, they should not feign indignation. They should be ashamed.

Our TV Turnoff Week got off to a lousy start — on Monday, both girls were home from school sick.

Normally, television is a treat when you are so sick you can’t do anything but lay on the sofa. Combine that with my need to get some work done – and I allowed them to watch a couple hours of I Love Lucy.

But that was a minor setback and did not derail us from our mission for the rest of the week.

I was happy with the girls’ ability to find something to entertain themselves — I didn’t hear a lot of “I’m bored!” — but they also spent more time playing together. And playing together invariably ends with the younger in tears because her sister either a) hurt her or b) said something mean to her.

So, more fights and more tears.

I stuck to my commitment to stay away from the laptop in the afternoons after the girls got home from school. We made cookies one afternoon but otherwise didn’t spend the time completely engaged with each other. However, since my nose was not stuck in a screen, the perception that I was available was there, and that made for some peaceful afternoons.

Over the course of the week, we realized how easily we turn to the television or computer out of habit.

I don’t think the experience will move us to further limit our screen time since we already allow only an hour-and-a-half a day.

But maybe now we’ll pause and think, do I really want do this right now?

Procter & Gamble has set up a toll-free hotline for feedback on whether or not they should continue advertising on MTV and BET.

(800) 331-3774

The Enough is Enough Campaign has asked P&G to remove its commercials from some of the programming on MTV and BET:

Proctor & Gamble has a campaign called, “My Black Is Beautiful.” . . . the campaign is about affirming the inner and outer beauty of black women.  It seeks to affirm the young black girls who “are at risk of allowing the negative images of Black women in media and entertainment to define their standard of beauty,” and “to affect positive change in the way Black women are reflected in the popular culture.” 

. . . The problem is that Proctor & Gamble is one of the largest, if not the largest corporate sponsor of music video programs on Black Entertainment Television; video programs that sexually objectify women, portray black men as pimps and gangsters, and promote ideas that are antithetical to this “My Black Is Beautiful.”

Sound familiar? P&G, however, actually responds by asking us what we think. Let’s tell them.

(800) 331-3774

Please spread the word, especially to those who have kids who watch MTV and BET.

Enough is Enough and Parents Television Council also recently released The Rap on Rap: A Content Analysis of BET and MTV’s Daytime Music Video Programming (report pdf).

Read more:

Faith in Action
Black Women Vote
What About Our Daughters?

Everyone probably knows that the National Conference on Media Reform (Robert McChesney! Dan Rather! Amy Goodman! Bill Moyers! Naomi Klein!) will be held here in Minneapolis June 6-8.

But, did you know that the day before, on June 5, Minneapolis is also host to the Action Coalition for Media Education Summit? Media Education 2.0: A One-Day Teach-In is designed to sharpen media education and technological skills to help turn citizens into media reform activists.

Of special interest is Using Big Media’s Exploitation of Children to Motivate Parents and Others Toward Media Reform with Josh Golin, associate director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood:

A media system designed to serve advertiser’s interests and not the public interest is bad for everyone, but it takes a particularly hard toll on children. Corporate marketing is a factor in many of the key problems facing children today, including childhood obesity, eating disorders, youth violence, precocious irresponsible sexuality, rampant materialism, and the erosion of children’s creative play.

In this workshop, we’ll examine how a combination of deregulation and new technologies has given corporations unfettered access to children and the latest techniques used by marketers to make an end-run around parents to sell children on anything and everything. We’ll then explore ways of mobilizing parents, not only to fight back against their children’s corporate abusers, but to become activists for policy change and media reform.

Program and registration information.

And then the following evening, June 6, is the opening night reception for Project Girl: A Multimedia Exhibition and Guide to Un-Mediafying Your Life presented by Intermedia Arts. Project Girl is a national touring visual arts exhibition and series of hands-on art-based workshops designed to defend adolescent girls from the harmful effects of media messages. The project co-creators, Kelly Parks Snider and Jane Bartell, will attend and Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Packaging Girlhood and co-creator of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, will speak.

Intermedia Arts may also be able to offer summer workshops for girls featuring the Project Girl media literacy curriculum, and media literacy curriculum training may be available for educators, parents, artists, activists, policy makers, and others if the program is adequately funded.

It would be a great opportunity for those who work with girls and need “to become better equipped to deal with the significant challenges resulting from the transformation of children into America’s number one marketing demographic.” Please consider donating to Project Girl.

The best way to tell you about the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood Summit is to introduce you to some of the people who were there. (If you’d like a summary of the Summit, read my guest post at So Sioux Me, and while you’re there, find out how Tracee Sioux is empowering mothers and daughters.)

All the way from Australia came Julie Gale, founder of Kids Free 2B Kids. Julie presented on advertising, regulations, and the sexualization of children. She elaborates on the issues faced in Australia in a 2007 television interview (which is also a great introduction to childhood sexualization):

Part 2 of the interview and other interviews are here.

I met Julie when she attended the lunch roundtable for bloggers. I hope she is able to join us in the blogosphere soon.

Parents for Ethical Marketing shares a goal with Kids Free 2B Kids: to gather concerned parents — and others — in one place as a voice for community standards. Join us.

Additionally, I was able to meet Mom from Outside the (Toy) Box and Amy from Shaping Youth. As bloggers, Mom and Amy have been with me since my Two Knives days, and it was crazy fun to finally meet them face-to-face. Mom also introduced me to Amy from Equally Shared Parenting, a resource and blog about, well, equally shared parenting.

More takes on the CCFC Summit:

MomsRising.org
Twixter’s Sabbatical
Center on Media and Child Health
Equally Shared Parenting

So how, exactly, does a ridiculous book published by a vanity press get a review in Newsweek? “My Beautiful Mummy” book: Newsweek beat-up sucks most in

The Anti-Advertsing Agency wants to help some poor marketer break free of their soul-sucking career: Foundation For Freedom announces grant program: The 2008 AAAFFFA

The Cause Marketing Forum will feature professionals who have produced the “most outstanding cross-sector campaigns” like Unilever’s Campaign for Real Beauty. We all know how Unilever contributes to the very problem they are claiming to help in the Onslaught video, but did you know about the palm oil? From Greenpeace:

Q:  What do you get when you schedule a dinner party during TV Turnoff Week?
A:  Two sick girls staying home for the day.

Parenting teaches you nothing if not flexibility. The dinner party will be canceled, we’ll see how the day goes with no TV (usually a treat when someone is sick), and the morning will not be spent writing a planned post.

Instead, I’d like to quickly introduce a new Corporate Babysitter feature: Disney Princess Watch.

The number of licensed character products coming out of Disney is fantastically ridiculous and someday, EVERYTHING YOU BUY WILL HAVE A DISNEY CHARACTER ON IT. Until then, Corporate Babysitter will keep you current with the newest, the most unusual, and the most inexplicable products featuring Disney Princesses and other Disney characters.

Today, the first Disney-branded refrigerated dairy beverage: Disney Little Einsteins Milk.

But as we know, Disney would NEVER imply that their refrigerated dairy beverage would help make your children smarter than, say, anyone else’s refrigerated dairy beverage. That is NOT what they are trying to imply with “Little Einsteins.” No. Of course not. They wouldn’t do that.

From the press release:

“Teaming with Disney provides the opportunity to create healthy products that kids will identify with, while enabling parents to provide a highly nutritional and great-tasting beverage that their children will want to drink,” said Sam Stremick, Director of Sales and Marketing for Stremicks Heritage Foods. “The new Little Einsteins milk line provides parents with an easy option for incorporating nutrients like calcium and DHA into their children’s diets to ensure optimal growth and development.”

Have you ever read such complete bull****? Really? You, Disney and Stremicks, are helping parents by slapping a Disney logo on a carton of milk?

What Mr. Stremick means is that since Disney has mastered the art of a) fooling parents with claims the Einstein products will make smarter babies and b) enticing children to nag for anything Disney, parents will feel okay about giving in to a wailing child in the grocery store screaming “I want Disney milk!”

Disney and Mr. Stremick, guess what? You’re not helping parents.

Read more on the CCFC Summit in my guest post at So Sioux Me.

I’m in. I’m taking Mom Unplugged’s TV Turnoff Week Blog Challenge.

I met several media-free families at the CCFC Summit and felt a tad sheepish that I wasn’t one of them. By the end of the Summit I was convinced that no media is good media and charged back to Minnesota with my plan to toss the television out the window.

My husband informed me that that was not going to happen.

So TV Turnoff Week is a great compromise. My challenge will be to turn off the laptop when the girls get home from school and not turn it back on until after supper.

Just typing that now has caused me to hyperventilate.

Want to join in? Head over to Unplug Your Kids – a great blog, by the way — to meet other families who are doing the same. 

Additional resources:

Center for Screen-Time Awareness
Kill Your Television
Stone Soup to Support National TV Turnoff