ravi wrote:
>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.
>
Well, yeah, yeah, yah.... It all started in the nineteen twenties....or
no, we can go back to the Strauss waltzes...and the scandalous behavior
of men embracing women while dancing....then flappers...then the
lindy....then Elvis, then the pelvis grinding of Rhythm and Blues, etc.
So there's those facts on the ground. There's also the fact that adolescent girls like to strut their stuff and test drive their new accoutrements.
The fashionability of whoredom is something else; it's consonant with late capitalism....and this is happening in the suburbs, which I keep saying are sick, sick, sick.
At my daughter's Oakland inner city middle school, there's a bit of this going on, but most of what is described in the article would be thought sluttish (bad) in the extreme.
Maybe it's time for everyone to read Kautski's book on the asceticism of early xtianity as a countercultural move to Roman grossness:
"Foundations of Christianity"
It's very, very good, and sheds an interesting light on current ascetic trends in Islam.
Joanna
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