Posted on 12/30/2006 7:27:56 PM PST by shrinkermd
It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so ... one-dimensional.
It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Of course, they STILL want to act like rape is against the law!
These girls can parade around dressed like prostitutes and then they blame the BOYS for getting aroused!
I couldn't be happier I never had a girl in this day and age!
Is wickedness becoming biblical in its proportions?
Thank the pot smoking, liberal parents of these kids today!!!
"Just you be sure that Beaver is clean."
I'm more of a prude when it comes to this topic. I work at a middle school, and I do not like seeing little girls becoming overly sexualized by this society. I hate even more seeing the children at the elementary schools I also work at wearing clothing that have been shown at fashion shows and designed for adult women (even then, I don't like seeing those fashions on adult women). While I want the enemies we are presently fighting defeated, I can certainly see why they don't want us involved in their world.
Both of my daughters attended public high school,(my younger is a junior) but they never went to the dances. Not their scene. I was glad and never pushed them to go to the prom. Now the after prom party was another story. That was put on my parents and apparantly was a great deal of clean fun which they enjoyed.
I never noticed much of a distinction myself. There is definately a slutty aspect to the Bratz toys.
I'm from your generation, and H.S. dances where I went to school had teachers and parents who were constantly going around the dance floor and putting a stop to any activity deemed inappropriate. Sometimes they were busy, but the behavior was stopped or those students left the dance. I can't see any reason why this approach should not be in use today.
Of course, since O'Reilly reads the NY Times, he'll be all over this. He loves the subject of school students gone wild for some reason or other. Should do him with a eeek of shows I won't watch.
LOL!!
Very good article. I have read of schools banning dances because of the simulated sex acts that are called dancing these days. Yep some parents did complain. But too bad for them.
How any parent can watch their daughter strutting like Sluts R Us is beyond me. Yanking my daughter off stage if she had ever done such a thing would only be the first part of a very long grounding.
Parents need to be aware of the toxic music, dance, movies and tv that our children are exposed to every day.
We can do our part by keeping these deadly toxins out of our home. We can provide a haven. We can give them the love and discipline to help them grow into self assured persons. Persons who do not need to define themselves by sexualizing their gifts. We can teach them that all they do should be for the glory of God.
I graduate in 1957 and believe me nothing like this would have been tolerated by the parents or the school administration. We were lucky if they let us square dance with the females in our class. As I remember, only once did that happen and the principal's wife was in charge. She was also a teacher and one false move she would have pulled us off the gym floor by the ears.
Perhaps I'm misreading this. It looks like you're saying that being aroused is an excuse for rape. Most people have roundly rejected the They-Were-Asking-For-It Defense, whether it applies to rape or any other violent crime. Besides, teenaged boys are aroused all the time.
The ACLU has fought against standards and dress codes at schools.
Anything goes.
It's not just adolescents. Could you imagine being Britney Spear's parents. I'd be so ashamed, I'd disown her.
Now in the 'zero tolerance' generation, the solutions are reduced to either banning social functions altogether or permitting sordid exhibitions as if nothing can be done. Whatever happened to adult guidance?
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