Did the Glee stars go too far?

Call me insensitive, but I think those people flipping out over GQ's cover shoot with the stars of Glee have got it wrong. The GQ photo feature is mind-numbingly sexist but it does not qualify as child pornography.

Let's take it from the top. Lea Michele, Dianna Agron and Cory Monteith appear on GQ's cover and on the inside as their high school characters in the hit series Glee. The photos border on soft porn, featuring Agron licking a lollypop while leaning against a school locker, for example, or the two women in their underwear. The Parents' Television Council has weighed in with all their fury, complaining that the spread – as it were – is nearly child porn.

I'm the first to be critical of sexual exploitation in the media but I'm not buying all the outrage that's been directed at the three stars who, by the way, are adults. In fact, Michele herself has commented that she was surprised at what the photographer convinced her to do. You get the feeling she did not go into the shoot with her eyes wide open and that a seasoned photographer was able to take advantage of that.

As for exploiting the Glee brand itself, the producers of the popular show haven't uttered a peep about the whole thing, suggesting to me that they're just fine with the publicity.

Back to GQ. The magazine is one of many rags that feed off men's sexual inadequacies and revel in treating women as sexual objects and mere things. It's obnoxious, exploitive and appallingly sexist. So I'm not surprised that they seized this cultural moment and are making the most of it.

But please don't confuse the GQ feature with child porn. To do so is to trivialize the meaning of child pornography. As I mentioned, the GQ models here are adults, able to make their own business decisions, even if Lea admits that she went farther than she thought she would. The GQ feature does promote the idea that women are only sexually interesting when they're young – not exactly new in a cultural landscape that suggests, if you looked at mass media, anyway, that women don't have sex over the age of 50.

But child porn is a very specific genre of pornography in which the sexual abuse of real children is recorded for the sexual pleasure of predators. The materials are shared among child rapists as a means of bragging about their crimes while, paradoxically, normalizing them – as in, "See? There are so many of us doing this stuff it can't be wrong." It's a bad idea to raise the child porn red flag every time a cheerleader gets photographed.

To parents who are distressed about the GQ feature, my advice is this: make your kids media literate so they can interpret and deconstruct the myriad images they're assaulted with every day.

Either way, lay off the Glee stars.

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