At least you have spoken about the pitiable toys that Rabid Capitalism is making of people, especially children.
But middle class generally likes that. They love to see their children performing the obscene. Fashion! Society! Modernity! Culture!...
Ramesh Bhatt
----- Original Message ----- From: "ravi" <ravi at platosbeard.org> To: "LBO List" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 11:56 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] Middle School Girls Gone Wild - NYT
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> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/29/opinion/29fri4.html?ex=1325048400&en=705673c2cb6fc865&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
>
> It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as
> hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here
> goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of
> three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not
> bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of
> music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged
> cheeks and glittery eyes.
>
> They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust
> their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like
> lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked
> from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without
> poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all
> whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so
> stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the
> floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
>
> <...>
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> It is news to no one, not even me, that eroticism in popular culture is
> a 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet, and that many children in their early
> teens are filling up. The latest debate centers on whether simulated
> intercourse is an appropriate dance style for the high school gym.
>
> What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger
> girls seem to have gotten in step with society’s march toward eroticized
> adolescence — either willingly or through abject surrender. And if
> parents give up, what can a school do?
>
> <...>
>
> But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over
> their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in
> helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the
> culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’
> ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and
> impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.
>
> There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto
> around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines
> sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem.
>
> <...>
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