What's Wrong With Boys, Luscious 'Lolitas' and Yummy Mummies?

[redqueen]

I really really love Soraya Chemaly.

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In general, parents, schools, counselors, "concerned" adults aren't openly confronting the unrelenting pressure girls feel to base their self worth on being beautiful, perfect creatures idealized for the sexual and breeding purposes of others. For many people, girls and women are biologically meant to be available to boys and men in these ways. Our default is "Yes!" and "Of course!" You know the kind of being I'm talking about -- females whose purpose, abstracted, divine or biological, is to look out for boys and men and guide them to ultimate pleasure and eternal happiness. Hey, aren't Victoria's Secret's models called ANGELS? What a visually pleasing, totally random and meaningless coincidence.

Once a self is ceded it's hard to get back. Regardless of a girl's or woman's age, this kind of objectification and "sexualization" results in a performance. It's not about being a sexual person, it's about acting out someone else's idea of a sex object. And, as in the video above, what girls and women want, feel, need and experience are irrelevant unless they help fulfill the dreams of boys and men. The impact is real, meaningful and measurable. It's also serious and not at all entertaining.

Girls who conform well and internalize their "thing-ness" don't miraculously stop doing it when get their driver's licenses. It NEVER ends. Which brings us back to Stacy, her hot, wet, mom and this book: The MILF Diet.

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Here is where I say that this isn't a girl/woman=good, boy/man=bad problem. This environment is equally toxic to both, but for entirely different reasons. But the issue here is a girl crisis we keep dancing around. What people like Burgdoerfer et al intuit correctly and leave unquestioned is that girls learn to self-objectify and they keep doing it as adult women in grossly gender-disproportionate numbers. The cultural idea that we have to calibrate how we should
look,
dress,
stand,
speak,
run,
sit,
eat,
walk,
work,
sleep,
starve,
fix our hair,
shave,
bleach,
cut bits off,
add bits on,
pose,
BE... in order to remain eternally dewy and optimized for male pleasure and comfort. This will be the case for as long as our human rights are mediated through boys and men and our equal access to resources, power, safety and everything else is vicarious and contingent on whether or not we are "nice" enough. It's assaultive. Regardless of how you dress up... or undress... there is nothing ironic or empowering about this process and its effects.

Mostly, many of us simply detach from ourselves and cheerily go about our days. And it has lifelong personal, political and societal consequences. Once in a while, a story is sufficiently appalling that it ruptures into public consciousness and we give it its 15 seconds, shake our heads and wonder how we got here. Steubenville is spelled with a 'u' in the middle, by the way.

The rite of passage we should be obsessing over isn't virginity, childbirth or mid-life aging. It's the inflection point when self-objectification settles into a girl's psyche because we failed to arm her with the cultural currency to say "hell no," or stronger, four-letter words to that effect. Even the strongest, most protective parental love is incapable of stemming the tide of culture, especially in our media saturated age.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/america-from-luscious-lol_b_3008557.html

Sorry for all the bolding but DAMN. Just DAMN.

Seriously, you need to read this.