A friend has been encouraging me to read
Chronicles for several years. It's her favorite magazine and, after reading the March issue, I understand why. Published by the Rockford Institute, Chronicles bills itself as a "magazine of American culture" and it certainly meets that description with a wide array of articles and reviews on what's happening now. Several articles in the current issue regarding the exploitation and sexualization of children particularly caught my attention:
Going Down With the Good Ship Lollipop by Jack Trotter and
Growing up Too Fast by Christopher Sandford.
Trotter opines that the sexualization of little girls isn't a recent phenomenon connected to the '60's sexual revolution, but goes back much further. "Long before Barbie and Britney...there was America's Sweetheart, Shirley Temple." Trotter recognizes the shocked reaction of the reader. "Surely not Shirley, that polka-dotted paragon of girlish American innocence?" but goes on to make a convincing case. As a Shirley Temple film junkie, I could nod my head as I remembered the scenes he described and recognize that perhaps the studio was using that dimpled flirt with a wink and a smile at the dirty old men in the audience.
Catholic novelist Graham Greene was among the first to suggest that Shirley was popular because of "a cocquetry [
sic] quite as mature as Miss [Claudette] Colbert's." He described Captain January as " a little depraved." Trotter goes on to say that "In short, Greene was implicitly accusing Fox of pimping its biggest child star." Fox reacted by suing the magazine which folded. But was he right? Trotter is casting no aspersions on Black, by the way, and neither was Graham Greene. Greene was more concerned over the exploitation by the studio which, by the way, banished the little girl to a "black box" (at age 4!) if she misbehaved on the set. Time is money after all. (See the Temple biography linked below.)
