Posted on 08/11/2003 7:05:43 AM PDT by bedolido
In the style section of the New York Times a few weeks ago, a layout was entitled: "The Mirror has Two Faces: Fall fashion addresses that great cultural dichotomy -- good girl or bad?" An immigrant might be puzzled reading this. Does the Times give fashion advice to streetwalkers?
No, the Times merely deconstructs the cultural zeitgeist and dresses its models accordingly. The message we absorb is that a lot of women think looking "bad" is good, and the fashion merchants, non-judgmental to a fault, are exploiting the vogue for hookerwear to their enormous profit.
If only it were only women they were exploiting.
I stopped at a toy store to buy a gift, and lo -- since when do toy stores sell bustiers, stilettos and pleather pants? Since children started wearing them, that is when. I read that a Hollywood star's little four-year old girl has a T-shirt bearing the message "Baby porn star." How very ironic and postmodern. Ho Ho. You can't instill sexual self-consciousness too young, apparently.
Should we then be surprised to learn that -- and this is a recent Canadian, not Hollywood, story -- unmonitored summer campers, aged 12 to 14, supposedly playing "tent card games," were found engaged in group oral sex?
The other day in a local womenswear store I witnessed a scene worthy of intervention by the Children's Aid Society. A slim, very fit young mother was shopping with her pudgy adolescent daughter. The daughter sorted yearningly through the baggy cargo pants, but the mother and the eager saleswoman kept urging low-rise mini skirts and tops on her. Obligingly, if self-consciously, the girl tugged on a too-small crop top and a skimpy Spandex skirt, exposing a wide swath of doughy stomach. Her mother cried "Adorable!" at each new and raunchier change of clothes. I wished I could haul the girl off to The Gap and fit her out in cotton crew neck shirts, fleece cardigans and a floppy hat.
At her bat mitzvah, my daughter wore a simple empire waist dress with a white lace Peter Pan collar. We chose her outfit together on a shopping expedition for which she was kitted out in slimfit corduroys and a crisp rugby shirt. That was a compromise: Her real preference would have been baggy jeans and a fluorescent T-shirt. But whether dressed neatly or grungily, neither she nor I wanted her being looked at in a sexual way.
What happened in 20 years to change self-respecting adolescent girls into self-marketing sex kittens?
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Feminism was supposed to free women to be themselves, not chattels to men. Women would enter the marketplace with their husbands. Women would be competitors, not cheerleaders. Women would make the news instead of reading it in their kitchens.
Well, women did everything they were supposed to do. They work, they govern, they are tennis Terminators. They are disproportionately represented in some professions, and girls out-shine boys in school. All the feminists' dreams have come true. The mothers of today's teens learned their lessons well.
Even the one that is turning our young girls' lives into a nightmare.
And that lesson was that women, in order to be truly equal in value to men, must assimilate a man's sexual behaviours and instincts. Are men obsessed with sex? Great. We're there. Are men aggressive in pursuit of sex, promiscuous, and emotionally detached from their conquests? Enter Samantha from Sex in the City with a vibrator in her purse.
So women are "there" in many legitimate ways; but sexually, a strange thing happened en route to "centre court." They took a wrong turn. Women started acting out men's fantasies instead of realizing their own. Hookers dress like they do for a reason. It isn't what they think is attractive or fashionable, it's what -- when men are paying for sex -- men want to see.
If women are finally sexually equal to men, why was everyone obsessed with little-girl icon Britney Spears' virginity and not Justin Timberlake's? Now Britney and Christine look and strut like pole dancers. Compliant women servicing hungry men. Some role models. Some feminist progress.
Deviance has been defined so far down that narcissistic, sexualized childhood is part of mainstream culture. You can delete your spam, avoid the tabloids, resolve to watch Nature and Masterpiece Theatre. But you still have to walk into a toy store occasionally. And what you are seeing there, and in the streets and schools, is the overt sexualization of little girls for the delectation of men and boys. Seduction-obsessed mothers today are complicit in this phenomenon by encouraging or at least doing nothing to stop it.
We are all wading through bathwater and there are babies drowning under our eyes. It is time to shut off the taps.
bkay@videotron.ca
© Copyright 2003 National Post
No, it takes "fashion" tips from them.
People are quirky -- sometimes you give them freedom, and they don't use their freedom in ways they are "supposed to."
I have a theory that with the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits and other threats to curb male sexuality, women have to dress more and more provocative to get a reaction.
The problem is that the choices are increasingly fewer.
A few weeks ago, we took our 12 year-old daughter to JC Penney to buy her some shirts. My wife spent almost an hour going through the Junior's section trying to find something decent.
She came out with one nice shirt. Literally everything else had some vile message on it. It was absurd. She actually complained to the manager, who told her that Penney had to compete with the other stores in the mall and that was their way of doing it.
We would have bought many other shirts if we could have found some without the "I Am a Young Teen Slut, Do Me Now" messages on them.
I have talked to some of these "progressive" parents who say that this stuff actually "breaks down the taboos" so that kids are freer to explore their identities (i.e. their sexuality). Perhaps that is true, if you hold off until their teenage years and raise them properly until that time. But I seriously doubt that is what is happening.
I have a 6-year-old daughter and I also have had some trouble finding decent clothes, especially for church. She is attracted to some of the sluttier stuff she sees in the stores but is still obedient when I refuse to buy them. But I worry about the future when she is not so obedient.
But I'll be willing to bet she had to look far and wide to find that simple waist dress with a white Peter Pan collar.
I have been on three shopping trips with my 10 year old granddaughter for school clothes and have wanted to have the guy by the throat who is designing and manufacturing these clothes for children. I got so tired of saying, "No you can't have that" three days and we got two pair of slacks a scort, and two shirts with a simple collar. I finally told her Mom I couldn't handle it anymore.. I bought her underware and left the clothes shopping to mom and the other grandma. I thought it would be fun to take he shopping. Boy was I mistaken.
I bought my daughter's clothes there as long as I could, and then she turned 9.
My daughter is cursed with genes that make her long-waisted, short-legged, long-armed and given her an apple-shaped figure. Trying to find decent GIRLS clothes (not slut-wear) for her was already a nightmare, and then the trend went crop tops and hip-hugger. I did find a new "Torrid" store at the mall -- thank God -- that had clothes that would fit her and COVER her too. I paid through the nose, but it was worth it.
My daughter is outgoing and has a wonderful personality. I don't want to quash that by putting her in dowdy clothes, but both she and I AGREE that she's going to dress decently.
Young women don't feel like 'chattel to men' when they dress provocatively.
They feel giddy with the power to turn heads.
I can just see it: "Vickie's Secret (tm)"...
--Boris
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