Thursday, January 04, 2007

Middle School Girls Gone Wild

Here is a pretty shocking essay (all parents please read) written in the opinion section of the NY Times dealing with what one parent saw at her 10-year-old daughter's middle school talent show. She says,
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.
I found this paragraph particularly poignant:
But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

1 comment:

Josh said...

Wow. That's disgusting. Since when did women drop the "we're not pieces of meat" line and embrace being objectified? And when did it become acceptable to objectify your own child?