Decoupling Seattle Family Law and Divorce Blog

Last month we wrote about a Judge in Saudi Arabia who refused (twice!) to annul a wedding between an 8-year old girl and a 47-year old man. Well times change quickly sometimes.  First, the groom himself agreed to divorce his child bride. So the little girl may get a childhood after all. Yay!

More surprisingly, the Kingdom may be deciding to join the 20th century (given, it’s the 21st century for the rest of us, but progress is progress) by banning all underage marriages.

According to the Toronto Globe & Mail:

“Among the options that are available and excluding the issue of puberty, is to ban marriage for [people] under 18,” Justice Minister Mohammed al-Eissa told Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

Don’t hold your breath, but it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Regarding my original article, a colleage of mine took exception to my short hand comparison of sexualizing teen idols like Britney Spears in America and sexualizing young girls through child marriage. The issue of child marriage, she eloquently explained, is more one of seeing women and children as chattel than of sexualizing young girls per se.

In response, I guess I think that child marriage is both an issue of seeing women and children as property and of sexualiziong young girls.  I also think that the way in which teen and pre-teen idols are treated, sometimes by their families, is about not only sexualization but also seeing children as property. Note that the list of child stars who sought and obtained emancipation from their parents includes Drew Barrymore, Macauley Culkin, Alicia Silverstone, and Jaime Pressly.

These are obviously complex issues and I don’t mean to imply that the treatment of young girls from culture to culture is identical. Rather, I think it’s too easy to criticize the practices of another culture, especially a more traditional culture, while evading the reality that American culture often contains parallel methods of exploiting women and children. What is constant is that the idea to become a star or to marry very young, is not usually the child’s idea, but rather a child’s following the lead of her parents’ wishes.

It is sad how often you see proud parents on television, for example, emphasizing that they had nothing to do with their child’s desire to lead a hectic life at the age of 10 or 12 – that it was the child’s decision all along. I once saw the parents of a figure skating champion prattle on about how their daughter chose this life without the slightest influence from either of them – getting up at 3:30 AM to practice three hours a day before class when she was just seven or eight years old.  While I accept that a seven-year old girl might think, and say “I want to go to the olympics,” I just don’t buy that this level of commitment is ever without external influences.

I think that often when kids decide that they want to be famous, for example, they are usually (but not always) simply attuning to the unmet hopes, dreams and desires of their parents.

I believe that given reasonable choices, in a balanced household, almost all kids – of either gender – just want to be kids.

P.S. -The issue of child entertainers admittedly does have a bit of a personal side for me. I was a marginal child actor (more like an extra) for like a year, on a PBS kids show. It was fun when I was in 5th grade. But going to auditions in New York City with dozens of other show biz kids really opened my eyes to how going that route wasn’t going to offer me much of a childhood.

I am grateful that when I lost interest in acting, my mother (who was herself an actress) never for a second pushed me on it. She never even discussed it with me.  Years later she told me that when I stopped asking about doing auditions, she just stopped calling my agent to set them up, and figured I could start up again if I ever wanted (I didn’t). She said she’d seen too many frustrated actresses channel their own ambitions onto their kids. Go mom.

Carroscolendas, circa 1975