[68skylark]

I think the article makes some good points.

(There are three photos that I didn't post -- someone with more html skills than I have might do this, or you can click the link above.)

Overall this story paints a pretty dark picture.

For those of you who feel the country is on a downward slope, I guess this will support your view, and maybe you have a point -- I don't know.

. . . one gets the sinking suspicion that a once relatively harmless fixation has become a full-blown, national psychosis whose victims just keep getting younger and more numerous.

I'm suspicious of people who assume things were better in the past -- it's usually a pretty weak assumption.

Furthermore, I've read millions of storis (like this one) which seem to complain about how "society" is putting out too many images of slim women, and causing problems by doing this. But when I look around my town, I see lots more problems of poor health (and premature death) from people who weigh way too much -- not from those few who starve themselves. So couldn't you make a better argument that "society" hasn't done enough to tell people (especially women) why it's in their interests to keep their weight in a healthier range?

[Slyfox]

She says she wants to be either a topless dancer or a showgirl.

[newgeezer]

"Girl Culture" project -- a book, an educational Web site and an exhibit now on display at the Snite Museum of Art -- the images are startling nonetheless. Standing face to face with strippers, topless spring break revelers, fat camp inmates, anorexics, debutantes, cheerleaders, models, junior high clique queens and pint-size Britney Spears wannabes

Yet another case of selling sex while hiding behind the "Isn't this simply disgusting?!!" disguise.

[mlmr]

Snap off the culture, turn off the tv. protect the children. Children do what they are told. The culture is telling them.

[expatpat]

I wonder how much of this 'psychosis' is the result of a hatred of women's bodies by homosexuals in the clothes/cosmetics industry.

[Aquinasfan]

For those of you who feel the country is on a downward slope, I guess this will support your view

I'll vote for the downward slope. With all the talk about female "body image," I still think that the ubiquity and danger of this phenomenon is not fully appreciated. The cause is culture-wide and includes everything from "reality" TV shows to the explosion of pornography and sex-drenched "women's magazines."

[weikel]

Show me a girl with no regard for her appearance and ill show you a man hating feminist.

[RonF]

"Where is the mother" (and the collorary, "Where is the father") is a central point that got far too short a shrift in this article. What we did hear of was a picture of a child and her mother, both trying to look 19.

Here's my solution. Don't buy the clothes. Don't buy the makeup. Don't buy the CD's. Don't take her to those movies. Don't buy the magazines. Don't let her watch those TV shows. Sure, she'll see it, but that doesn't mean that you have to give it your stamp of approval or have it around her in your home. Tell your daughter you don't want her wearing that stuff because you don't want her going to school looking like a whore. Encourge her to engage in activities like band, chorus, athletics, Girl Scouts, anything where she has a chance to attain accomplishments that allow her to build her self-esteem from within, by actually doing something, instead of becoming dependent on trying to achieve self-esteem by getting praise from others for empty things such as what she wears or what she looks like.

Anyone watch the show, "Eight simple rules for dating my daughter"? The central characters include a father worrying about his very attractive teenage daughter and her involvement with boys. However, the title implies that he's trying to figure out how to control boys around his daughter. What he really needs to do is control his daughter. The younger daughter understands that the major problem is that the older daughter goes to school dressed like it's "casual sex day" at school. If the old man wouldn't let his daughter dress like a slut and made her stay home and study at night, he's have a lot easier time with her.

Anyone ever watch these shows and notice how in all the tours though all the rooms of these expensive homes, there's never one book in sight? And never a magazine, unless it's a pop-culture one. Guess they value things and expensive clothes very highly, but not education or non-popular culture.

[A CA Guy]

Don't we need some Anna Kournikova pictures to represent one of the ideals in this thread?

[Brookhaven]

Just another example that moderation is the key to life.

And this is true for men also. Want to find the unhappiest man on the block? Look for the guy that married a woman just for her looks.

Good looks are like desert. A great treat, but you can't live off of it. After a while you start craving real food, and if you don't get it then that desert starts looking pretty bad to you.

[Nick Danger]

Sex is power, at least for young women, so why would we be surprised that they would seek to maximize it? Like all things though, the power of sexual attraction has within it the seeds of its own destruction. It is subject to a kind of inflation, a debasement of the currency. With provocation everywhere, a girl has to be damned provocative these days in order to do any serious provoking. This seems to be a one-way trip toward a kind of sexual ennui where men get so jaded by it that only the most stunning women actually see any gain from it. In pursuit of power, these girls are rendering themselves powerless.

The world is designed extremely well. People should have more respect for the world's ability to tolerate, and correct for, excess.

[Billthedrill]

The boys get it too, albeit in seemingly smaller numbers. You now read of steroid abuse reaching junior high school levels.

It strikes me that modern popular culture has put a premium on youth ever since motion pictures, and accelerated a good deal since the advent of television, possibly due to the dynamic nature of these media in emphasizing physical activity. Just a thought and I throw it out for comment - that's what FR's for, after all.

I think it is pernicious to be telling adolescents "this is the prime time of your lives, don't miss it - you'll be miserable when you're old." To be honest, I can't think of a single aspect of life that isn't better for me at 50 than at 16, whether it's disposable income, accumulated knowledge, even physical development, and the latter hasn't taken a huge amount of effort. Well, there is a certain reduction in the frantic nature of sexual excitement, but then that pre-gym-class boner dread isn't really high on my list of quality of life issues.

It may be that one cure for this is to let young people know that aging isn't really all that bad, in fact it's considerably preferable to the alternative of making a good-looking corpse, James Dean despite. He'd be 72 this year...

[geaux]

When I was in college fifteen years ago, the toilets in our sorority house backed up on a regular basis because of all the purging going on around the house. One group of girls would compete to see which one could go the longest without eating. When my mother was in highschool, almost forty-five years ago, she and her friends would eat only celery for days at a time to avoid gaining weight. When my grandmother was a young woman, about sixty-five years ago, she starved herself during pregnancy for fear of getting too fat. Her mother before her suffered fainting spells because she insisted that her corset maintain a thirteen inch waist. I went to my three-year old neice's birthday party yesterday, and her favorite gift was a Barbie doll. Girls and young women want to be the most desired creature on the block -- and that's not fat and ugly. You can't change ugly, but you can change fat.

[sharktrager]

If you really want to be shocked, start looking at sites run by and for so called "Ana's". Ana is the term they prefer to use for Anorexics. And they don't feel Anorexia is an ilness, they believe it's a lifestyle choice. They are full of tips on how to purge, and often have galleries where Ana's can show their bodies.

Most ISP's and hosts will take down the sites as soon as they get a complaint, but they just pop-up somewhere else.

[537 Votes]

I don't think bodily obsession is a good trend, but with American females reaching all-time record levels of obesity, something rings hollow here. I think this article is more an example of the modern American female's obsession with self-pity.

[danelectro]

this is the artist's online photo exhibit for girl culture.

[The FRugitive]

[Southack]

"This really grew out of the last book I did, 'Fast Forward,' which was about kids growing up in L.A., how they grow up so quickly, and specifically looking at the culture of materialism," she said."

Except that children aren't really maturing (mentally) faster, they are simply becoming more material oriented, as well as learning to be more agressive and cycnical and manipulative in their attempts to obtain said materialism.

For instance, a mature child does not "purge" her supper in order to try to keep her skinny figure looking slim-enough to attract the most superficial boys, but a cynical, manipulative, materialistic child will so do.

---

In Genesis, we are told that Cain slew Able. What we aren't told (because today's clergy are all hopelessly uneducated in the classics as well as superficial and materialist themselves) is that "Cain" is Yiddish/ancient Hebrew for "spear", while "Able" means "vanity" in that dialect.

Thus, recorded human history essential began around the time when humans finally slew the vanity that lives amongst us, a battle that we are still fighting to this very day.

[Lizavetta]

"I really want to be a teenager. Now. Really fast," says Lily, 6, in one of the revealing interviews that accompany the photographs. "(Teenagers) dress up cool so boys like them. I saw it in a movie. They get dressed so fashionable, like a doll and stuff. They usually do this cool makeup, like lipstick. And a really blushy face. It's cool."

As opposed to my 6 year-old daughter, who 'gallops' around the house in her panties pretending she's a horse, Bambi, or one of our dogs.....who will dress up in sweatpants, a leotard (over the sweats), her pink cowboy hat, and a backpack, and then want to go to town....who deliberately eats onions and garlic just so she can chase her older brothers around the house to *breathe* heavily on them.....has no clue who Britney Spears is.....and makes up her own vocabulary of words like "beanstrapper" and "poopsnotter" when she can't think of anything else.

In other words, she's totally innocent of pop culture, she does her own thing, and she's a lunatic. Oh, and she doesn't go to school, thank God, where all of this would be shamed out of her for being different.

[LiteKeeper]

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