A childhood skin-deep
Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:
Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult...she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry...Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.
Full piece here. It was written more than seven decades ago, to describe the carefully cultivated, "sexualised" screen persona of a specific child star, but I think it’s just as relevant to all the little boys and girls who appear on TV reality shows like Boogie Woogie today, enthusiastically simulating the dance movements of adult Bollywood heroes and heroines, while their parents watch fondly in the audience. In the age of 15 minutes of fame, you don't have to be a Hollywood superstar to grow up too fast.
on Friday, April 25th, 2008, 9:28 am in Dance, Film, Profiles, TV › 
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Kinda like Mini-pops, just learned of them when browsing more Tracy Ullman skits.
When little boys on those reality shows play at being a ‘hero’ it’s kind of funny but the little girls doing a coy bottom-wiggling Kajra-Re really worry me. It’s as if they’re being taught very young that their role in the world is all about seduction. And then there’s the trendy, sexy clothes for under-tens, god help us.
SP: but you can argue that those little boys are being trained to become cocky, swaggering roadside-romeo types when they grow up, and that’s just as bad.
True, true. Perhaps what bothers me about the girls being more sexualized is that it’s part of a general tendency to force girls to grow up faster, and not have as much of a carefree childhood where they can play and be rough-and-tumble. They are given positive reinforcement for being “pretty” early on, and in the desi context scolded and shamed for not covering up/being modest fairly early too, and given adult responsibilities like housework much earlier, and it’s all part of the same uncomfortable mix of expecting girls to grow up faster and yet being afraid of their independence or maturity or sexuality.
I’d notice and get angry about the inverse phenomenon in the Middle East as well, with little girls sometimes as young as six and seven veiling, as if they had to be self-conscious about their sexual charms at that age!
I thought ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ raised this issue in typical indie movie style — through funny caricatures and clever one-liners, just enough to male the audience laugh and also squirm in their seats.