Posted on 03/25/2011 7:33:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
Many Americans were disappointed when President Obama devoted a Saturday radio address to a celebration of the progress of women in society. Most of us were more interested to hear about the progress (or lack of it) in dealing with the crisis that threatens to become a new war in Libya.
The president was excited about a new White House report on the status of women, the first such report in 48 years. John F. Kennedy assigned Eleanor Roosevelt to explore the subject on that occasion.
Obama told us that women earn more high school diplomas and college degrees than men, and the number of women in the workforce almost equals the number of men. But they still don't hold as many power positions.
You might not have noticed this report's significance, however, since it was issued just before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Samantha Power, a senior director of the National Security Council -- three of the most powerful women in the Obama administration -- effectively persuaded the president to put America into the coalition against Moammar Gadhaffi.
It was a throwaway speech but dear to the president's heart. He wants to see his two daughters grow up in a world "where there are no limits to what they can accomplish." Fair enough -- but the growing problem for the female sex in this country is less political than cultural, and it starts in the home, not the White House. We're talking image rather than achievement.
The problem that needs our undivided attention could have fit under a chapter head in Betty Friedan's celebrated '60s best-seller, "The Feminine Mystique." You could call it the "The Sexual Sell." The sexual sell is seen first in little girls who graduate overnight from demure princess dresses to party dresses with what they imagine is cleavage, from playing dress-up in mom's shoes to wearing their own spike heels.
Superficial sophistication is no longer a way for a child to try on different adult styles for size, but rushes young women into a false feeling of safety that is sexually enticing, disarmingly seductive and potentially explosive.
The slinky dress on the preteen may be "cute" when she's hanging out with her girlfriends, but it quickly becomes "hot' on a teenager hanging out with boys, blurring the boundaries between innocence and sexuality.
"Why," asks Jennifer Moses in The Wall Street Journal, "do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this -- like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves -- but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?" The answer indicts a generation of mothers who grew up as the most liberated generation in history, and who are only now having second thoughts over what they want for their daughters.
"We were the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up," she says. "We were the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputation but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find our true womanhood in the bedroom." And now thousands of moms don't have a clue about teaching their daughters the perils and foolishness of giving away their bodies so readily.
There are lots of reasons for the current excesses of little girls whose sexy style goes way beyond their psychological ages. We could round up the usual suspects in media and advertising, with focus groups and consultants, but common sense is all anyone needs to see what happened. It's one of those pesky unintended consequences of the sexual revolution.
Post-Pill mothers worry more about appearing like hypocrites with their daughters than assuming parental authority, setting thoughtful moral guidelines. They can expect to hear the same excuses from their daughters that daughters have made since the first cave girl donned a well-off-the-shoulder leopard skin.
High-tech complicates matters. Coinciding with a mother's ambiguous messages are the peer messages bombarding the adolescent's cell-phone network, merging texting with "sexting." When these young women get to college, parents can expect no surrogate gatekeepers to help them resist the increasing pressure for "hooking up."
This mother's plaint about young girls in "plunging necklines, built-in-push-bras, spangles, feathers, slits and peek-a-boos" is getting none of the buzz of a similar plaint of the famous Tiger Mom about permissiveness in educational discipline. Modern moms seem to be more animated over how their children study for the SATs than how they deal with their beckoning sexual lives.
They should reprise the cliche nearly every mother once asked her daughter on her way out of the house dressed like a hooker: "You're not wearing that?"
Darned if I know. I suppose it’s possible NPR does, or that lefty Sirius/XM station with no listeners.
I have never heard an Obama speech. Once in a while I read a bit of a transcript on FR, and that’s bad enough. I’d rather listen to the byos fight over which one of them gets to be a triceratops or the baby reciting the “Big Bang Theory” theme song. Or even Bill’s ghastly white-noise “music.”
http://agendadocumentary.com
No I haven't. Thanks for sending. The trailer is fact on. Will get the DVD. Every kid in high school should see this. Education of Truth is the Key. . .
And I hate that commercial.
Daddy's trying to protect his little girl. And Mom...
And of course the message in the commercial, is that dad is a prudish idiot, Mom is hip and cool, and the daughter is pretty and innocent.
The reality, Mom is the idiot, Dad is wise and protective, and the daughter is on her way to being a slut unless she wises up, and dad grows a spine.
What a disgusting generation.
Not only is there no stigma, it is viewed as a status symbol. That and you get free daycare, tutoring, and applause for being “A dedicated single mom!”
My wife has students in high school with three or more kids. Think about that.
Yes! NPR.
Padded bikini’s for 8 year olds from A & Fitch.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2694534/posts
My Mom would not have phrased that as a question. It would have been “You are not wearing that!” Period.
Yup, it doesn’t work all the time, but yeah, lots of them don’t bother, and don’t really care if they get pregnant or worse, they secretly (or not so secretly) want to get pregnant. It’s just not a big deal if they do.
Tart but not bitter?
Yes, it’s been 7 years since I taught high school, but I remember when I started teaching and I was shocked the first year that I had a ninth grader come in pregnant and she had a child at home already.
I still get angry that we make single moms into heroes. I’m sorry, no. They are just people doing what everyone does. And to begin with they made a mistake. After that, they may still be making mistakes or they may have straightened themselves up, but they are no more heroes than married mothers, just because they have kids.
Ha! That's the exact reason my mom gave me for not allowing me to see it when it first came out.
ROFL!!!!!
About the only time I hear any of his “speeches” is if I hear a clip on the news or one of the talk shows I listen to all day. His voice is like chalk on a blackboard -— I’ll listen to my own singing first, and I can’t carry a tune in a pickup truck :)
hmmm you mean my dad was one of the few who thought his daughters should know how to change oil and rotate the tires when they got a drivers license? LOL I do know how to do those things, but do enjoy it when I have a flat and some man stops and helps me!! thanks guys!
LOL!
My mom would never have allowed me to wear anything like that. And it’s not just a girl thing either. If my brother had tried to leave the house wearing gangsta-style jeans that show God knows how many inches of underwear, Dad would have made him go back and put a belt on. Fortunately my brother has better taste in clothing than that.
They do seem to be getting younger and younger, don’t they? I once had a roommate who was a sex-positivist, San Francisco, loony left types who had sex with a 29 year old man when she was 13. And he was a cop!!! She saw absolutely nothing wrong with the relationship. I was shocked.
Liberal moral relativism requires the suspension of all logic. We must be tolerant of everything except intolerance as defined by the liberal elite. We must respect all cultures except those that are actually different from liberal culture. There is no truth and there is no objective right or wrong except that it is true that making moral judgments is objectively wrong. Moral relativism is an intellectually and morally bankrupt philosophy.
Geez. We have to wade through 5 or 6 paragraphs of paean to Obama before we get to the gist of the story.
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