“Lolita” and the “Sex Bomb,” Figures Socializing Young Girls. Hypersexualization in Question
“Lolitas,” essentially literary or cinematographic figures in the second half of the twentieth century, became a veritable fashion phenomenon for young girls in France in the 1990s, before the massive addition in the following decade of the figure of the “Sex Bomb,” which metamorphizes the body of a child or teenager into an eroticized sexual body. This calls for consideration of the issue of clothing. The models of femininity reflected by these figures simultaneously affect the nature of childhood, the virginity of little girls, and the codes of eroticism of an overt femininity. This article proposes to question these identity models in the light of a twofold analysis. An initial historical overview will highlight the emergence of these eroticized figures and the transfer of the literary character to the world of fashion. Then, a complementary analysis of magazines specifically for little girls and young women first reinforces the role of these media in the spreading of such models of femininity, while also appearing to provide the key to a possible emancipation from these models. Finally, while the question of the eroticization of the bodies of young girls is central, the notion of hypersexualization raises the issue of the social control of appearance, which will be the subject of the last section.