Pretty In Porn
A friend of mine, the mother of a son, confronted me with some photographs of my daughter and some of her girl friends, at a church camp. All the girls were posing in their underwear, with pouty looks on their faces, like Victoria’s Secret models. Evidently, the pictures had been inadvertently left at the boy’s house after a get-together. I didn’t blame the woman, who was going to each of the girls’ mothers with the photos. If my son’s female friends had left such pictures in my home, and he had seen them, I would have been mad, too.
“The boys weren’t supposed to see them,” said my daughter, defensively. I was angry because I was embarrassed—hadn’t I taught my kids better? “We were all girls. What’s the big deal?” My older daughter matter-of-factly concurred that she, too, had taken similar pictures when she went to camp.
I couldn’t do much but deliver to my daughter a stern lecture about how boys are affected by such pictures, that’s why you should dress modestly, don’t advertise what you aren’t selling, yada, yada, yada. I think perhaps if her older brother had been home, I would have enlisted his help in getting her to understand the seriousness of such behavior. As it was, I could practically see my admonitions going in one ear and out the other.
We all know that issues of modesty and appropriateness are difficult these days—unfortunately, more so for parents of girls. It’s legitimate for young women to want to feel attractive, and it’s normal for young men to be attracted to them. After all, the propagation of the species depends on it. But what I’m seeing out there now goes beyond what we’ve all become desensitized to by tabloid television and gossip magazines. It’s no longer enough for girls to look pretty. It’s no longer enough for girls to look sexy. It’s no longer enough for girls to look slutty. They want to look like soft porn models. And as my daughter’s and her friends’ reaction suggests, they’re unselfconscious, proud, and even defiant about it.
A walk through the shopping mall features displays with photos of half-naked women, sultry half-closed eyes and parted lips, their long, carefully messed-up hair suggesting they just arose from bed. Even the female shoppers are in revealing clothing and smoky eye makeup, with half-bared breasts, bare midriffs accented with navel piercings, and the “whale tail”—thong underwear showing above low-cut pants (often accompanied by the now-familiar “tramp stamp”—the tattoo grazing the top of the whale tail).
Bombarded by Victoria’s Secret catalogues, booty-shaking music videos featuring scantily clad dancers, panty-free celebrities, and increasingly frank articles in teen magazines, girls have gotten the message that revealing clothes, bolstered with push-up bras and accented with siren eye makeup and high heels, are de rigueur, even for school.
Moreover, the push for porn starts young: Target carries teeny hot pants that barely cover preschool girls’ underwear. Gap sells hot bikinis for the floatie set. Often, parental objections to this clothing is dismissed by other parents: “Oh, what’s the problem?” It’s cute.”
While it may be cute to see a four-year-old running around in a jeweled halter top and miniskirt, if you don’t let her wear stuff like that now, you have a much more substantial leg to stand on when she wants to do it at age 15.
I want my girls to feel attractive and fashionably dressed, of course—I want to be that way myself. I work very hard to find the happy medium between allowing them to totter around like streetwalkers and putting them in burkas (which I am sure my husband would prefer). I suppose it makes me a prude to be the parent who says no to bare midriffs, who tries to encourage her children to appreciate modesty, to value themselves for their intellect and talents more than their faces and figures.
But the clothes are an expression of a more disturbing, and rising, trend of teenage sexual behavior: Oral sex. More than half of teens (55% of boys, 54% of girls) have engaged in oral sex, according to the Center for Disease Control. Moreover, because it is not actual intercourse, kids do not consider oral sex to be unsafe, or even to be sex.
If you want to shock yourself, cruise through a website called People’s Dirt. Perhaps the most egregious of any teen website to date, this site enables schoolchildren across the country to post vicious, unsubstantiated, and sexually lurid rumors about other kids—all anonymously. A quick scan of some of the “message boards” reveals a familiarity amongst even middle-schoolers with sexual activity that once was confined to sailors on shore leave:
“Latest scoop in the coffee shop? Grace took a little more than she could swallow and... well... lets just say it got a tad messy.. ;)”
“They will screw any guy at a pArTy, espceiallly if they r drunk.”
“…heard she dishes out the bop for her mexicans mowing her lawn”
Unfailingly, these obscene accusations are posted by boys, indicating which way the sex usually goes (put it this way: it’s hardly liberating for the girls). Much of it may just be talk and bragging—and even girls trying to get back at other girls—but whatever it is, it should make every parent’s hair stand on end.
The concept of chastity is completely foreign to these kids, though it seems technical virginity is still a line of demarcation for some. The constant presentation of young women as sexual playthings only seems to result in young men taking advantage of them. And it’s not just a problem for the girls: How do I teach my son to respect and treat the opposite sex in the face of all this? Emphasizing sexuality over other personal attributes is bad for both girls and boys. Men come to think of women as one-dimensional, only there for visual and sexual gratification. Girls value themselves only as sexual beings, therefore trivializing their other qualities.
But regardless of what I personally teach my own children, they are the peers of others whom I see becoming increasingly jaded and cynical about sexuality and self-control. A year or so after the underwear photo incident, along came every parent’s nightmare: A classmate of my daughter took nude pictures of herself and sent them electronically to her boyfriend. They later broke up. The boy celebrated his ex-girlfriend’s 18th birthday by sending the pictures to every guy he knew. And one of them showed the picture to my kid.
At this, my daughter expressed shock and sadness. I feel secure she won’t do the same thing—but I think it took a personal experience such as this to drive home the point that such matters are serious, and often have painful consequences. And no doubt soon the photos will be posted on peoplesdirt.com—for the rest of the nation to see.