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Some recent developments can give you pause if you’re a parent, or just a human being with a working disgust barometer:
Younger and younger people — technically, children — are depicted sexually in media.
The darkest porn concepts you could drag from the depths of your id are easily accessible to kids online and serve as their distorted sex-ed.
Director Darryl Roberts’ documentary, America the Beautiful 3: The Sexualization of Our Youth, aims to address that. He explored beauty and weight in his first two films. But his third effort is unfocused, unenlightening and almost too amateurish for serious consideration.
With a montage of images anyone with even a shriveled soul would find inappropriate, Roberts cites an American Psychological Association report that calls the sexualization of young girls a “mental health crisis.” Depression, eating disorders and lousy self-esteem are some of the fallout.
Sitting at his computer and viewing skeevy material with a look of consternation (lots of footage of that), Roberts says in voice-over, “Deep in my heart, I knew there had to be a solution.”
He starts with some of the roots of the problem. President Reagan’s deregulation of children’s TV ads in 1984 allowed advertisers to bypass parents and go straight for kids. Roberts also looks at the hormone oxytocin, whose critical role in bonding and monogamy may suffer with porn consumption.
Roberts also visits the freakish world of child beauty pageants, interviews teen moms, and touches on the much larger topic of objectifying women.
But he spends the most time following two teenage girls. One made news for racy yearbook photos and wants — with her obsessed mom — to be in showbiz. The other is one of his own interns, whom he encourages to protest Abercrombie & Fitch, and who then comes onboard with the company — along with Roberts — for an anti-bullying tour. The film (and apparently Roberts) spends way too much meandering, dragging, occasionally creepy time with the girls. In one uncomfortable scene, he cajoles the showbiz aspirant into renewing her broken promise to use condoms. Ugh.
ATB3 is comically low-rent, like an old SCTV sketch. Stultifying interview footage sees people against a brick wall wearing clip-on mics. Jarringly, the sound doesn’t match from one cut to another. An interviewee is identified on-screen as “porn user.” It looks like it was assembled by someone learning iMovie on a laptop. ATB3’s heart is in the right place about a serious issue. And that’s about the most you can say for it.
