The United States is a pretty good place to be if you're a girl. When we think of girls in need of rescue from sexual oppression, other countries come to mind, such as Thailand, Afghanistan, China, and many places in Africa. Yes, there is sex trafficking in America, brought nearer the surface through big events like the Super Bowl, but it's not generally a place where to be born female is to be born into especial danger.
And yet there is a form of sexual slavery here that endangers our girl children, and that it is not on the order of life under the Taliban is no excuse for not fighting it where we can. Jennifer Moses, writing in the Wall Street Journal, exposes one battle front in Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That? Why do so many barely-teens adorn themselves like a child molester's dream? And why are their parents complicit?
Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards? I posed this question to a friend [who replied,] "The girls in the sexy clothes are the fast girls. They'll have Facebook pictures of themselves opening a bottle of Champagne, like Paris Hilton. And sometimes the moms and dads are out there contributing to it, shopping with them, throwing them parties at clubs. It's almost like they're saying, 'Look how hot my daughter is.'" But why? "I think it's a bonding thing," she said. "It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there."
I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"
So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.
I wouldn't want us to return to the age of the corset or even of the double standard, because a double standard that lets the promiscuous male off the hook while condemning his female counterpart is both stupid and destructive. ... But it's easy for parents to slip into denial. We wouldn't dream of dropping our daughters off at college and saying: "Study hard and floss every night, honey—and for heaven's sake, get laid!" But that's essentially what we're saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they're still living under our own roofs.
Brava! to Ms. Moses for exposing the problem and taking a stand against encouraging our daughters to think of themselves as prey.
On the brighter side, Heather reports that, thanks to the near-hysteria over sun exposure, it is now much easier to find modest bathing suits for girls than it was when she was a child. An SPF-50 bikini serves no purpose. I can't wait to see Faith's new purple shorts-and-shirt combo suit this summer!
