Joyce McMillan: Protecting our children means we must stop using sex to sell

The truth is that those ranges of raunchy little clothes for young children would not exist if there was no market for them.

IT'S not often that I feel moved to quote the great Noel Coward; but there are times, in the national life of the UK, when no song will do but his 1940 classic, There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner. According to a recent survey, we're not only out of sorts in Sunderland and terribly cross in Kent, as the great Sir Noel put it; we're also 70 per cent convinced, across the nation, that Britain is "broken", and 63 per cent sure that it's heading in the wrong direction.

As many commentators have since tried to point out, the idea that British society is "broken" is not one that could be seriously entertained by anyone who had ever actually seen a failed state, or a broken social structure. But still, something about the social problems we do experience – notably high levels of economic inequality, the general unsustainability of our resource-guzzling lifestyle, the decline of community, and the breakdown of traditional forms of family life – seems to cause us so much stress that we feel as though we are living in desperate times; and makes us clutch at some improbable political straws, in the search for answers.

Which is why it probably makes every kind of short-term sense for the Tory leader David Cameron to suggest – as part of his "Broken Britain" campaign – that he is the man to give British children back their childhood, and in particular to protect little girls from the scourge of sassy, sexy clothes and other merchandise, marketed straight at them.

It's more than six years, now, since British Home Stores withdrew its "Little Miss Naughty" range of clothes and underwear, following protests from customers. But still, many shops are carrying child-sized thongs and brassieres, makeup and basques, high-heeled shoes for tots, and T-shirts with raunchy slogans. Millions of people are quite rightly shocked and distressed by this trend; and many may warm to the idea of a new, fresh-faced prime minister who not only tries to create a climate of disapproval around such material, but also says that he will remove government business from companies who make or sell it.

In the end, though, it seems to me that David Cameron's fine words on this subject are likely to enter political history as an example of the impotence of 21st century governments, rather than of their effectiveness; if only because of the profound dissonance between what 21st century citizens say they think or feel, and what they actually do. For the truth is that those ranges of raunchy little clothes for young children would not exist if there was no market for them.

On one hand, people say they are concerned about the loss of childhood innocence, about the dangers of paedophilia, and about the pervasiveness of sexual imagery in our culture. Yet on the other, faced with the merchandise itself, and with the pester-power of a mouthy six- or seven-year-old for whom the "right" clothes are a social essential, millions of parents actually get out their debit cards, and buy the stuff.

Short of banning the merchandise outright, in other words, it is difficult to see what government can really do to prevent this process; precisely because it takes place at a level of subtlety and ambiguity – in the gap between intention and action, or between denial and knowledge – that companies and their advertising agencies understand, but that politics has not really been able to master. When it comes to selling a David Cameron or a Tony Blair to the voters like some sexed-up brand of soap powder, political spin-doctors are masters of the marketing art. But in the matter of policy, politicians limp lamely along behind the commercial game, protesting a little here, regulating a little there; but fundamentally unable, or unwilling, to muster real public support for any move that would simply stop exploitative commerce in its tracks.

There is a debate to be had, of course, about how we strike the balance between commercial freedom, and the wider interest of society in the health and wellbeing of everyone, including children. But in pursuing that debate, let us at least not deny the extent to which we have all been changed – both spiritually and emotionally – by the steady commercialisation of aspects of our lives which once used to be dealt with in a social context.

For millions of people, sex itself – in its raunched-up, internet form – has become a home-delivered commodity available to the solitary consumer at the click of a button; for millions more, seeking ever more extreme thrills, that commodity has moved on into zones of violence and exploitation, including exploitation of the very young, which have little to do with sex, and everything to do with the deliberate sexualisation of perverted power-relationships. We would be naive not to recognise the extent to which that imagery has drifted into our wider culture; and naive to assume that it does not indirectly affect the way our children see themselves.

And we would be supremely naive, above all, not to recognise the links between that increasingly sexualised culture, and the way in which we are bamboozled, cajoled and teased every day into buying a myriad of goods of doubtful quality and usefulness, from glutinous chocolate bars to big cars with bull-bars.

If we want to protect our children from a society that relentlessly arouses and exploits our erotic impulses, in other words, then we need to wind back the history of the last half-century or more, reverse most of the non-essential economic growth that has taken place during those years, and stop using sex to sell everything from vacuum cleaners to vodka.

And if we don't want to do all that, then we should perhaps stop nodding agreement with the words of politicians who specialise in regretting what they will not prevent; and accept that we have made a world that pushes childhood to the margins because sex sells – and because in this world, we sell, or we die.