pantryslut | (no subject)

Middle School Girls Gone Wild, in the NY Times.

Having just (finally!) watched Little Miss Sunshine this stuff is on my mind. I have only a few comments to make.

1) Why is it that these articles always blame everything and anything for the sexual corruption of our little girls...except, um, patriarchy? Misogyny? If you prefer less loaded language: the lack of other available and visible opportunities for women in our culture? I mean, there's a wave at this in the very last paragraph, but it's almost a token gesture after all the previous handwringing about overpermissive parenting and such.

2) I hate to sound like a broken record, but you should have seen some of the sexual capers I was pulling in middle school, publicly and otherwise. Pre-teen girls (and boys) are very much in the thick of exploring their sexuality. If sexuality is represented as glittery eyeshadow and booty pants, that's what you'll see middle school girls wearing. And dancing in. At talent shows.

3) Significant pop culture signifiers of sexuality when I was a pre-teen girl include, not in order of importance: Duran Duran ("Girls on Film," "Hungry Like The Wolf"), Eurythmics ("Sweet Dreams," "Who's That Girl"), Prince (where to start?). Just sayin'.

4) OK, at my talent show I chose to paint myself with green and purple oatmeal and re-enact Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video instead. But you should have been at some of our practice sessions...

ETA: 5) And let's not even talk about how old I was when I first heard "Superfreak," or my positive reaction to it. I had half a clue as to what it was about. Honest.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

How the hell did that writer get "slutz" past the Times' copy desk???

Yes, and eighteen years ago parents were up in arms to hear their peripubescent daughters chanting the lyrics to 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny"

Op-eds in the New York Times never blame the Patriarchy because, well, it's the Times. They can no more blame the Patriarchy for the sexualization of girls than the Wall Street Journal can blame Capitalism for the social depredations of poverty.

Speaking of Little Miss Sunshine, your post got me to paw through Harlan Ellison's TV criticism to find his review of the "Our Little Miss" pageant in 1970:

Then they brought out the half-dozen La Petite division children. Ages three to six. Tiny. My God, small. Innocent. And ... oh, Jesus Jesus ... they had blue eyeliner and lipstick and that awful model's pose ... three to six years old ... Oh, Christ! They look twenty-five!

How can they do it? How can they turn kids under six into jaded strumpets of twenty-five? Mother of God, they all looked like hookers!

(The Other Glass Teat, Pyramid Books, 1975, p.147)

Ellison blames the organizers, who he strongly insinuates are pedophiles, and the children's parents, ascribing no agency whatsoever to the contestants. One of the charming things about Little Miss Sunshine is the powerful agency and intention of the young heroine who competes.

Yes, we like to construct these kids as little sponges, with no agency at all, and I always wonder if that's part of the problem to begin with. I am thinking now of the bubble vs. the stream metaphor that Delany offered up at the alt-parenting panel last WisCon (and how the audience blithely ignored it and went on to hand-wring about how to maintain the bubble).

can you say more about the metaphor? I am a curious beaver...

He talked about how the popular model of the family is as a bubble or cocoon: the parents/caretakers/adults surround the kid and keep it safe from incursions from the outside world.

He suggested that instead, we might think of the family as a stream. The kid is a stream. The parent is a stream. Other, outside influences are also streams, maybe smaller streams, maybe less strong. But they all mix and separate and mix and the best thing you can do is be a strong, constant stream for your kid.

This is a paraphrase from memory, btw, and about seven months later :), so I may have mangled it a little.

Another way of looking at it is that the bubble model is static; the "stream" model is designed, I suspect, to reflect the movement of time.

Makes a lot of sense to me. The bubble seems pretty damn delusional anyway.

Op-eds in the New York Times never blame the Patriarchy because, well, it's the Times. They can no more blame the Patriarchy for the sexualization of girls than the Wall Street Journal can blame Capitalism for the social depredations of poverty

My favorite sentence of the year. Thanks. :)

It strikes me that there's always been age-inappropriate modeling of this sort -- back when I was a kid, it was Barbie-based, I think.

It also strikes me as aspirational, cultual and imitative (duh, I know you know).

I don't know what I'd do if I was a parent, and I don't think it's okay, either. But I do think that part of this is also misunderstanding kids' sexuality, which is different than the adult aspirational sexuality marketed to them.

Yes and yes and yes. I don't think it's OK, I don't think it's merely lax parenting, I do think that it's a misunderstanding (and/or out-and-out denial) of kids' sexuality, I don't know what to do either but I do know that the discussion is entirely misframed.

I know some of what to do (and so do you, and so does

final_girl. Talk honestly to kids about sexuality: yours and their own and the culture's. Always point out inappropriate use of sexuality when you see it, taking the kid's age into account. Expect your children to have agency more or less from birth (ever watch a mom have a battle of wills with a 6-month-old? I have, and it's ugly). Encourage agency even when you're also saying, "No, you can't use that agency right now." Model respect for everyone, the child first and foremost.

That's how you get to the life some women I know grew up in, where their mother's rule about overnight guests (when the kids were fairly early in their teen years) was "Don't bring anyone home overnight that isn't going to be around for a while. If I have to deal with strangers at breakfast, they better not be one night stands. I've done that for you, and I expect the same courtesy."