While I agree with everything else in your post and with the top 1/4 inch of the above quote, that's not the whole story. Porn has never before in the history of the U.S. been so widely, deeply and ubiquitously available — nor available to the point of unavoidability even to small children. People had to be of age, and had to go to certain stores and bear the shame of being in those stores in order to get porn up until the rise of Playboy and Hustler and the lawsuits over porn in the late 1960s, when many of us FReepers were already young adults and our values formed.
Now, ads on tv and in print, song lyrics, movies and the internet are awash in the types of imagery that would certainly have been labeled obscene prior to 1970. Every younger girls are wearing obscenely revealing clothing and aspiring to get boob jobs at younger and younger ages. Mothers have actually been petitioning stores over the sexualization of girl and toddler clothing, particularly Halloween costumes. When I went to my niece's dance recital ten years ago, the three-year-old beginners were dressed in sparkly black bathings suits like hootchie mamas, with very bare legs, lurid make-up and feathers on their heads, and did a boom-boom dance, to hoots of appreciation from their relatives in the audience -- in this day of child abuse, I was completely appallled.
There has been a net increase in the open and available imagery of porn, no matter how long the history of its existence.
“When I went to my niece’s dance recital ten years ago, the three-year-old beginners were dressed. . . .”
I have many issues with Disney, but their “Princesses” are typically wonderful and demure, as are the costumes there are exceptions to this — Jasmine, for example).
It’s no surprise they’ve done so well commercially -— it’s hard to find normal, non-sexualized (e.g, Barbie, although we gave into that) toys for girls.