Re: Excellent post, Seth!

Thank you so much for the long and thoughtful post. I would like to comment on the Coppertone baby image. Unfortunately, the company bowed to pressure and has since created a censored version of it in which the girl's swimming bottoms are not pulled down as far and the crack of her behind isn't visible. In other words, she's been desexualized precisely as you describe. Furthermore, the once warm rich tones of her body have been bled and the three-dimensional image flattened, creating a little girl logo not mch different from that used by Wendy's restaurants.

What's most interesting about that to me isn't the censorship itself but the reality that a very realistically depicted child has essentially been iconized, and by extension fetishized. The logo is not a little girl--it's an idea, a suggestion of a little girl if you will, not merely desexualized but dehumanized. I can only wonder if the Coppertone execs and advertisers, or indeed the public, realizes the irony in that. It is not we who fetishize children; it is those who turn them into two-dimensional metaphors and allow no realistic children to be portrayed in such a context.