Miranda Devine

Miranda Devine is a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald. This article appeared on 3 October 2002.

There are some things you really wish Americans would keep to themselves. Like the Olsen twins. The 16-going-on-26-year-old billion-dollar bombshells with the flowing sex-kitten hair and slinky clothes flew out of Sydney on Friday after their whirlwind marketing tour, not a minute too soon.

Mary-Kate and Ashley are probably nice, wholesome teenagers, but the unsettling image they project to their target "tween" market of six-to 12-year-olds is of the precocious, unnaturally poised pre-adolescent adult now common in American middle schools.

With $1.8 billion in reported annual sales of their mary-kateandashley line of make-up, clothing, accessories, dolls, backpacks, video games, videos and bed linen, the Olsens have capitalised on the TV fame they achieved as toddlers in the sitcom Full House. They are rated 84th on Forbes magazine's 100 top-earning celebrities. Their tweeny fans, who queued for hours last week near the Opera House, will now be able to buy their products at Target stores.

While the Olsens' official Web site is a straightforward marketing exercise with make-up application tips and photos of the photogenic pair riding horses and flirting with singleted hunks, there are other, less savoury Internet spin-offs.

One features a countdown until the Olsen twins reach adulthood - 618 days from today. "Gentlemen, start your engines and get out your best booze. The countdown has begun. The Olsen twins are waiting for you!" is the caption next to a come-hither photo of the pair.

It's hardly the message Australian parents want for their little girls, but it is one that increasingly, relentlessly, is being forced on them. From 13-year-old models with thrusting hips to full make-up kits for 10-year-olds, sex has become an acceptable marketing tool to child consumers.

"We've never seen such a marketing onslaught aimed directly at children as we have the last year or two," says Jane Roberts, a child development consultant and vice-president of the watchdog group Young Media Australia.

Roberts says she recently tried to buy clothes for her 11-year-old daughter, who has grown out of the bows and frills of childhood. But "my only next option was to dress her straight into sexy Britney Spears clothes" - midriff tops, plunging necklines and skintight pants.

While adults who refuse to grow up are wearing baby-doll dresses, pig tails and barettes, real children are increasingly given no choice but to dress like mini-adults. Something is out of whack when stores like Target sell padded bras to eight-year-olds while lingerie stores sell G-strings emblazoned with Tweetie birds to adults.

Roberts says the Olsen twins market to children aged from six to 16, a "huge developmental range", with little differentiation between the products aimed at six-year-olds and post-pubescent 16-year-olds.

She points out that puberty is occurring earlier than ever. A British study of 14,000 children last year found 17 per cent of girls showing early signs of puberty at age eight, compared with 10 per cent a generation earlier. In America, a 1997 study found the average onset of puberty occurring at 10 for white girls and nine for African-Americans.

Some researchers point to nutritional factors and obesity as the cause, but there is evidence suggesting social factors may also influence the timing of puberty. Girls living in step-families are twice as likely to reach puberty earlier, a University of Virginia study of 1400 families, published in January, concluded. The study found 35 per cent of girls living in step-families start menstruating by 11, compared with 18 per cent of girls living in traditional families.

If social factors do hasten puberty, what influence comes from marketeers peddling sex to eight-year-olds? "Marketers are just not distinguishing between children and adults," Roberts said yesterday. "Children have the products and the image and the gloss to be sexually provocative and yet [they] don't know what that means."

Increasingly concerned that marketing to children via new technologies - such as the Internet, video games and CDs - is bypassing the traditional gatekeeping role of parents, the Australasian College of Physicians is working on a policy addressing the public health impacts, to be published next year.

"If you talk to anyone who works with children that in the last few years, [you will find] there has been an enormous influence on the health and development of children," Dr Michael McDowell, a Brisbane pediatrician, said yesterday.

McDowell, who is helping draft the policy, says negative impacts on children from media range from childhood obesity to mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and social marginalisation.

And for the first time, video games and the Internet "speak directly to children, bypassing the structures than have evolved in families over hundreds of years to protect them". Parents haven't been able to filter influences from a dazzling array of new technologies. Marketing flies straight under their radar.

While not wanting to sound like a "Mary Whitehouse puritan", he says sexualisation is one of the consequences. "Corporate interests are engaging vulnerable children in a direct consumer relationship ... and the danger is children don't have the cognitive abilities to deal with it."

One bright spot comes from Max Markson, Sydney's uber-marketeer, who doubts the Olsens will take off in Australia unless the twins are on TV every week. But so far none of the free-to-air channels has picked up their shows. Cross your fingers, parents of Australia.