Let's talk about raising normal girls in today's porn-o-rific society...

[wildebeest]

and/or, normal boys, for that matter. Since we all know our culture is sick, and rotting from its core, any thoughts on how to bring up normal kids in the face of aggressive marketing, violent, woman-hating porn, and the culture of narcissism? No? Me neither. I'm afraid for all of us.

http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20070101_139023_139023

[sandnsea]

1. respect, communication and boundaries

Worked in my family.

[silverojo]

2. K&R

It's something that needs to be dealt with. I've never seen such a generation of girls that believe they're supposed to be sexually subservient. :scared:

[democrat2thecore]

3. It's a problem

It all comes down to a layer of corporate entities titillating for profits. There is a girl down the street who is, I believe, 11 and she is very conscious of this. This year, she began going to a private school. What did they put her in? Plaid skirts and the whole "schoolgirl fantasy," uniform. I think this is a HUGE problem in society that nobody wants to talk about and deal with. In blind, anonymous studies you see rather shocking percentages of men attracted to young, young girls. I think children have been effectively sexualized through entertainment, advertising, etc. for profit and it has de-sensitized our shock at so much of this. Look at the success of "To Catch A Predator." I'm not at all sure it's about anything other than exploiting fantasies of young girls. In fact, there's an entire book coming about about the sexualization of young girls in our culture and the author (who was on NPR a week or so ago) argued this very thing about that show. I'm glad my children are grown - it's getting SCARY.

[zazen]

6. the "Lolita" genre of porngraphy is thriving

I've been so scared of this, as a mother of two school-aged daughters. I've seen ample evidence that a significant percentage of men are being grossly manipulated by the porn industry into eroticizing younger and younger females. It's ultimately each male's ethical decision not to use this documentation of sex crimes, but they're allowing themselves to be orgasmically conditioned to think that 'hebephila,' which is not the same as pedophilia, BTW, is normal, and that all men do it and all 13 year old girls secretly want it. Your average Playboy user 15 years ago wouldn't think of using this stuff, because he'd have to go to some seedy underworld to buy it. But it's a click away. There's even an alt.binary. erotica site called 'pre-teen' etc. (I won't mention the other words). Why anyone would be stupid enough to subscribe to that, effectively giving their IP to the FBI, is beyond me, apart from the utter lack of conscience it shows.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

4. thank you for the link,

I started to read that article on a plane months ago, but it was a really short flight. (ottawa-toronto)

I like to think that the young women in my family are "normal" and their all born and raised in the youth self-destruction capital of the world, Orange County. I think much of it is encouraging non-conformity at a young age, and by non-conformity I don't mean what is marketed as non-conformity as in blue hair, nose rings and goth music.

And for lack of a better description, a sense of judgement, virtue and morality. I know it is supposed to be so bad to be judgemental, but if a young girl is getting the impression she might be superior in some way to a girl who dresses like a prostitute, that might not be a bad thing.

I saw a child getting scolded recently in a mall after she pointed at a girl in the food court and said "she looks dirty" well that was a pretty apt description of the individual in question, she looked like she just wandered in after a night of turning tricks on the Sunset Strip!

The mother scolded her daughter and told her never to judge people by how they look and that girls can dress however they like and that when she is a big girl she can dress like that too!

What kind of lesson is that?

If I had a young daughter and she was expressing judgements of that sort, we would be stopping at every toy store in the mall and ice cream serving establishment on the way home.

Society has taken on the attitude that having any personal sense of self worth or a strive for any level of sophistication is elitist and that if you have a personal standards better than those of say Kevin Federline - you are an uptight prude.

A child with a personal sense of disgust at certain behavior will be more immune to peer pressure and less likely to comprimise for approval than a child who has been told for years that there is nothing wrong with it and is pineing for the approval of that ground.

So those are my thoughts as a thirty something man with a whole flock of young female relatives.

[fasttense]

5. I think communication is the key.

I have always made a point of being able to talk with my daughter. My mother use to say "you can talk to me about anything." But I quickly learned that if I told her about certain behaviors I observed in others, she would scold me, punish me or order me not to be with certain girls. (which was impossible since they were at school every day). I quickly shut up about the drugs and sex I saw all around me. I never told my parents anything about the difficulties I faced in life. That just made it twice as hard to survive.

I never punished my daughter when she told me of things that would make most mothers hide their daughters away. She had friends in middle school who were doing drugs and sleeping around. But I listened and tried to give good advice. We would analyze and try to understand why certain girls did certain things and we would develop a plan for how she would behave in similar circumstances. She never simply imitated those around her because she wanted to be accepted. She would use me as a sounding board and sometimes as her stress outlet. But I understood when she was angry and needed to vent on someone safe.

Now she's in college, a straight "A" student, with a nice boyfriend and good friends. We talk at least twice a week and she is happy. What more could a mother want for her daughter?

Keep communicating especially with teenagers. It is hard to take sometimes, but well worth the effort.

[noamnety]

7. Throw out your tv

not that that solves the problem, but there is nothing worse for bombarding a girl from infancy with the nonstop message that girls are passive decorative beings who exist to snag a man and raise a family.

[Frustratedlady]

8. The old standbys

Love, communication, rules/limits and unconditional support. A family is a human home...not a structure of wood and brick. It should be somewhere that is always open, always loving and always truthful. Limits should be set and enforced.

When my 3 children were grown, each thanked us for setting limits and sticking to them. Only then did they tell us how many times that saved them, as they could say their parents wouldn't let them or would "kill" them (figure of speech) if they did THAT, etc. They said their friends often commented, "Well, at least your parents care what you are doing." Those kids were from good, solid, middle-class families, too. I was quite surprised.

Don't get me wrong. We still got the, "I hate you!...You don't love me...All my friends' parents said it was OK, you are just old-fashioned." kinda stuff, but deep down, they knew we were usually right. If we were wrong, we admitted it. Nothing wrong with being wrong, unless you continue down the wrong path.

[Katherine Brengle]

9. Awareness and love. And hope.

I have a 3-year old daughter, so I think about this a lot.