A recent Times article entitled "Middle School Girls Gone Wild" outlined the half-naked writhings of 12-year-old girls to song lyrics detailing an oral sex driven male pleasure fest in the author's local middle school gym. The parent's horrified account of having been forced to watch her 11 year-old daughter trapse around suggestively in front of the entire school brought up the very real problem of hyper-sexualizing our youth.
I say if you want female teeny boppers tramping it out on dance team, dress the football team in skivvies for female viewing pleasure too. It's only fair. How about making hot pants required attire for playing football, basketball, baseball or soccer? Why not ban shirts altogether for male athletes so we can see what's under there? If girls are forced into such exposure at school functions, I figure -- why not level the playing field ...
Boys are hardly ever prone to such baring of the 'bootay' as women. Neither are they nearly as inclined to base their merit solely on their body type and appearance.
Focusing on the development of external beauty and enhanced sexuality, especially at this early and awkward stage of development can only serve to detract something from a girl's sense that her intellect and internal qualities matter much. Why bother developing much of anything else, if overt sexual displays glean power and attention?
It's time that we, as a society, pay attention to the unevolved and unequal version of sexual liberation we're toting to pre-teens directly and indirectly via subtle and not-so-subtle messaging. We need to take charge of the values we're instilling in our young women and men, promoting evolution, education and self-worth rather than sexual objectification.
Innocence is lost earlier and earlier, these pressures come full-force soon enough without reinforcement from our educational establishments. These children are victimized enough by irresponsible propaganda bombarding them from birth without giving them the mixed-signal of sitting them in abstinence only classes while asking them to provoke the sexual urrgings of the opposite sex. It's time for frank and forward discussions about the plight of pre-teens in this country who are having more sex at earlier ages while being given less information about how to deal with such things.
When we push an unrealistic abstinence-only agenda while allowing for overt sexual imagery to permeate the psyches of our young from the earliest moments of life, we are acting as catalysts in denial. We are acting irresponsibly. We are letting down the very essence of our future.
It's time we put our little girls back in decent clothing, quit teaching them that beauty is everything, trained them to take responsibility for their bodies and allowed them the tools to make informed and reasonable decisions when they are of age to do so.
Letting 11-year-olds do a strip tease for their middle school is hardly educational. I wonder where these programs have room to exist while half of the art and physical education classes in the same grade level have evaporated?
We claim to have come so far, but it seems to me we're backsliding unawares, and that is frightening. No, I don't really want pre-teen boys half naked either. I just wonder at the failure of the educators in charge to see a problem with both the inequity inherent in the situation and the impropriety of sexualizing 11-year-old girls.