Posted on 04/01/2004 2:24:45 AM PST by goldstategop
American culture grows more crass by the day. One of the most successful American TV shows is The Apprentice starring Donald Trump, a man loaded with money but bankrupt of class. The highlight of the show is when Trump humiliates potential employees by barking at them, "You're fired!"
One can only grieve over a culture that promotes a coarse womanizer who has dumped a wife or two in favor of young models as its symbol of professional success.
Indeed, watching people be humiliated is big business on American TV. Shows such as American Idol feature judges like Simon Cowell known as Mr. Nasty who shoot the middle finger at contestants they don't like. Public degradation has become as American as apple pie with programs like Fear Factor garnering huge ratings by having participants eat bugs and swim with dead mice. But perhaps the most disturbing example of the culture of crassness is the growing trend of famous young women going through the rite of passage known as the nearly naked photo spread.
Such recent graduates of the you-may-think-I-have-a-brain-but-let's-instead-focus-on-my-bust school of celebrity include Scarlet Johansson, who acted superbly in Lost in Translation, which made her famous enough to qualify for a cleavage-bearing photo op. Janet Jackson, of course, joined the club when she decided to have us all forget about her dancing and focus instead on her nipples, while Britney Spears is, of course, the club's founding member.
The reduction of talented and intelligent women to two breasts and a vagina has reached its apogee with the Girls Gone Wild videos, in which tens of thousands of college girls, often on spring break, flash for the camera, their sole remuneration being a feeling of deep satisfaction that they have played their God-given role as entertainment for lecherous men.
Why have millions of young American women abandoned the feminist dream of being taken seriously by men and instead decided to gain male attention with degrading spectacles of their bodies? I am convinced that the principal cause is an increasingly weak link between fathers and daughters.
IN OUR society, we have it all backward. Too much is made of the father-son relationship at the expense of the father-daughter one. The image of a boy being taught by his dad to catch a baseball or throw a football is commonplace, while the only mainstream image of a father interacting with his teenage daughter is telling her not to come home too late when she goes out with her boyfriend. Pop tarts like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who use partial nudity to advance their careers, are often close to their mothers, who may even serve as their managers, while their dads are nowhere to be seen.
Where you do read about a father's central involvement in his daughter's career, it usually leads to respectable women like Steffi Graff and the Williams sisters, who have resisted the offers for provocative photo spreads even after they became famous as tennis stars. This is not because mothers don't love their daughters but because men are much more successful at protecting their daughters from other men. And when a daughter receives strong masculine validation from a loving and caring father, she is usually not desperate for sexual attention from manipulative and hormonal men.
Recently the New York Times ran a front-page story about a 15-year-old girl who refused to have sex with her 16-year-old boyfriend. He promptly cheated on her. When the girlfriend found out, she told her boyfriend that they should cut class and go and have sex. She did so, she said, "in order to keep him." When I read this story, I wondered Where is this girl's father? Had her father been a strong male presence in her life, she would not have been so desperate for the affection of a scoundrel.
EVEN WHEN I go to a Yankees game, I take my five daughters along with my older son. True, they often don't know the names of the players or even the score, but they know their father loves them and hates being separated from them. There is a special connection that daughters have with their fathers that even a mother cannot replicate, which grants young women a startling immunity from compromising themselves with jerks.
Indeed, when a daughter is close to her father and respects him as a man and a dad, she begins to judge other men by that same high standard. When she dates men, she will not judge them by their smooth talk but by the depth of their commitment because her own father was not a talker but a doer. She will not jump into bed with a man just to please him. She has high self-esteem, and she expects the men in her life to make an effort to please her rather than the reverse. Her idea of a relationship is not going down to the guy's level but raising him up to hers.
THIS IS why it's so important for a father to remain the most important man in his daughter's life until she is at least 20. I always lament witnessing the deterioration of the homes of my friends whose teenage daughters are always out, either with girlfriends or boyfriends. My daughters will not date until they are of marriageable age in our communities from 19. Up until that time, my own love for them will sustain their need for male attention. They will not be forced at too early an age to worry whether they're pretty enough, smart enough, sexy enough, or attractive enough. To their father, they are just perfect. And they will internalize that message in their most vulnerable years so they can grow into confident and robust women who attract men out of strength rather than weakness.
As for the criticisms that too close a relationship with your daughter will impede her ability to later form close connections with romantic partners, exactly the opposite is true. A young woman with an involved and loving father gains the confidence in herself to sever the childhood ties with her father and begin a loving relationship with a man precisely because she has learned to trust men. She has no fear of being vulnerable a prerequisite for romantic love because her father has shown her an example of a man who can be trusted and relied upon.
But if she feels betrayed by her own father, she will often run to another man more to escape pain than to find love, which is what usually makes her a prime candidate for that revealing photo spread.
LOL
If you come to visit unannounced, I'll greet you with a shotgun.
Those pages are hidden from the general public; I've just been sharing them with family and friends (although of course nothing is truly "private" on the internet).
I'm being just a bit playful with you in the first sentence.... On the other hand, I am very eager to defend my family and do away with anyone who'd do any harm to any of them. Not "willing"; "eager."
You've hit on another aspect of raising children that is so key. This is the village that it takes to raise a child--the church and the neighborhood (NOT the state). I raised a daughter who is now 19 without her father (his choice). She is very conservative and a darling--well most of the time. We lived for a number of years in a neighborhood where we were the only single-parent family and we were the only family not to have problems with at least one child. I got a tremendous amount of support from our church and a neighbor adapted herself as a grandparent. We have done just fine, although it has indeed left an emotional hole in my daughter (we've talked through the years about the need to forgive those who hurt us). But I told her growing up that no one has a perfect life and that doesn't give anyone an excuse to do wrong. She needed to take responsibility for her life as it was and she has. Fathers are immensely important, but NOT having one is no excuse for turning out bad.
Not everyone has such a social circle. I would prefer more guys to be that way myself.
So, knowing what we do about boys (that they are very visually motivated), what do you call it when a girl dresses so provoctively?
I call it advertising. "Here it is boys, come and get it"
Does that mean that the girl is more to blame than the boy. No. It does however show that the feminazis have hurt her more than they've helped her.
Women marry for security. Men marry for sex. Or at least that's how it used to be. Now men can get the sex without having to be married so why bother providing security. When the current girlfriend gets worn out or boring dump her and get a new one. The feminazis have raised a whole generation of women willing to be used and discarded.
It's become very hard (in most areas) to find good women anymore. My daughter will be one. And my sons (if I have any) will be raised to be good men
I forgot one other advantage to not watching TV.
The Christmas lists were always short and reasonable. No requests for expensive junk toys.
Shalom.
What do you think about a society that teaches men to go for the girls that ADVERTIZE? What a weird way to put it. Good women aren't the only things in short supply.
"Truly private"? "Hidden from the general public"?
You just posted the info to one of the most popular sites on the planet. Currently frequented by denizens of the scumbag left. I've got three daughters of my own. I keep everything about them genuinely private. You might want to consider doing the same,
You think it's that bad? Who's going to look up his info? What about freepers who put their own names on FR?
As for freepers using their own names, the only ones I can think of have something to sell (not literally but along the lines of op/ed sites with which they are affiliated.)
I see your point.
LOL!!!!
Though, there are a lot of fun things you can do by yourself.
Just ask Betty Dodson.
-good times, G.J.P.(Jr.)
hehehehehehe
On a personal note, my own daughter, who is 10 recently had heart surgery. Afterwords, when we were discussing when she could return to various activities, the first question out of her mouth was, "How long until I can ride on the back of my Daddy's Harley?" I have a feeling she's not going to be a pushover for boys at all.
It seems to me that we've had this discussion before and I know that the double standard is a real sore point with you.
I'll agree that that double standard exists and is unfair. But it's there and we have to deal with it. That said, however, boys and girls are different (thank you Lord) and respond differently to different stimuli and need to be treated differently in some circumstances
Boys respond very well to visual stimuli while girls are more responsive to touch. Therefore it's in everyone's best interest for the girls to dress more modestly than they do now and for the boys to keep their hands to themselves.
I do not believe that society "teaches" boys to go after the girls who advertise. I believe that that is just part of our fallen nature. Boys will take the easy lay unless something else gets in the way. When society is "doing it's job", social mores will get in the way. Girls who advertise by dressing immodestly will be looked at as tramps or worse (at least that will be the trained internal impression left on the boys) and the boys will seek a better class of women to associate with (because the boys themselves would be looked down upon for running with tramps).
At the same time the boys would be perfect gentlemen to all people, even the girls who advertise. Of course this is impossible without a strong Christian society.
Man is a fallen creation. We naturally seek to do evil and to please ourselves. To do otherwise is unnatural but it is the only way that society can truly thrive. Again only a Christian society can really thrive.
Last night I overheard a perfect example of the damage the feminazis have done to this country. I was watching my seventh grade niece play volleyball and in the row ahead of us was a girl (7th or 8th grade) talking to a bunch of guys. What she said was something along the lines of "I already made out with two people before I got here tonight". Pure advertising. What she was really saying (at least what the boys were hearing) was "I'm really easy and I'm looking to get laid". Now it's tough for a guy to turn down an invitation like that under the best of conditions but when he is a teen boy, probably doesn't know Jesus as his Savior, has few positive role models as to what a real man is, and has hormones running rampant, it's nearly impossible.
So, are the boys at fault for taking her up on her offer or is she at fault for making it in the first place? I'll answer that for you. She's at fault for making the offer and they are at fault for accepting. However, it's far easier for her to eliminate the problem entirely by not making the offer at all.
It seems to me that we've had this discussion before and I know that the double standard is a real sore point with you
*** Yes it is, esp. since I'm a modest single female who notices these things. I know that life isn't fair *lol* but oh well I'll say it anyway. Life isn't fair :-) and women are held to a much higher standard than men. I do not like giving men the wrong impression so I dress accordingly. However, this society is all about servicing the sexual needs of men so even if a girl doesn't want to 'advertize' she almost has to if she doesn't want to stay a spinster. I don't dress provacatively as I wasn't raised that way.
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