At what age do women start taking care of their appearance?

Girls can begin to gain popularity through "sexy looks" as early as six years old if they have a living example in front of them - for example, a mother who is overly concerned with her own appearance.

The dolls your daughter plays with reveal how aware she is of the role of sexual appearance in social life.

Both adult women and teenage girls strive to look charming, and it would be logical to assume that this is primarily related to sexual attraction. It would be strange to find a desire for a sexy appearance among very young children. In elementary school, erotic motives in behavior, if they exist (let's not forget Freud), then they are deeply hidden. Nevertheless, psychologists from Knox College (USA) claim that 6-9 year old girls already consider themselves as a sexual object and strive to look accordingly. Not a single Nabokov, not a single fighter against pedophilia even dreamed of such a thing.

The psychologists' experiment was quite simple. Little schoolgirls were shown two dolls: one dressed fashionably but neutrally, the other in a tight and revealing outfit, with obvious erotic hints. The girls were asked to compare the two dolls and say which one looked like them, which one they themselves would like to be like, which one they would like to play with, which doll would be the most popular student at school. The researchers were quite surprised when the children chose the sexier doll: 68% said they would like to be like it, 72% - that it would be more popular at school than an ordinary doll.

Here, obviously, lies the key to the erotic preferences that girls show beyond their age: sexual appearance leads to popularity. However, the difference that was discovered when comparing regular schoolgirls with those who go to a dance studio is curious. Little dancers dreamed of a sexual appearance much less. From an everyday point of view, this is again difficult to understand. Psychologists explain this by the fact that dancing makes girls evaluate their own bodies differently, using other parameters for such an evaluation. For dancers, “sexuality” is not the most important parameter, so in their case the chances of a sexual and non-sexual doll were more or less equal. It is curious that sexuality does not play a big role among boys either: although the desire for popularity is not alien to them, it is realized in other ways, not through a sexual appearance.

Why do little girls develop such a craving for sexual appearance even before the awakening of attraction and the accompanying hormonal changes? In an article published in the journal Sex Roles, the authors consider several factors. One can assume that all the evil, as usual, comes from television, but this will not be entirely true. Television has such an influence only together with a living example. If, in addition to television, a girl sees her mother paying attention to her own sexual appearance, then “popularity” and “sexuality” in children’s brains will be interconnected.

At the same time, a mother can suppress the influence of TV on her daughter by commenting on what is shown there. TV can play an educational role: when adults made a negative example out of TV, the popularity of the sexy doll fell by 7%. In the same way, the mother's religiosity counteracted the corrupting influence of TV. But here, too, there is an interesting nuance: if the girl did not watch TV and grew up under the care of religious adults, then her desire for a sexy appearance only increased. In this case, obviously, the craving for the forbidden fruit is activated: it is hidden, and therefore arouses special interest.

How such early socio-erotic preparation of the psyche affects the further development of the personality, one can only guess. Although it is unlikely that knowledge of how sexuality is connected with popularity is so necessary at the age of six. It can be assumed that girls who have been striving for sexual popularity since elementary school will have big problems in adulthood, when they have to build personal relationships.

But perhaps the most important conclusion that can be made here is the following: do not demonize television and other media. TV with its "Dom-2" spoils a child only to the extent that you allow it. And even with the TV turned off, you have a good chance of spoiling your child yourself - if you are not inclined to monitor your behavior in his presence.

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