why are we sending our children there? ......

[Guest guest]

NY Times, December 29, 2006

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Middle School Girls Gone Wild

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

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.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I

just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long

Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and

hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.

It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t

make the girls look so ... one-dimensional.

It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and

necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and

they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a

public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen

children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.

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? A teacher at the middle school

later told me she had stopped chaperoning dances because she was put off

by the boy-girl pelvic thrusting and had no way to stop it — the

children wouldn’t listen to her and she had no authority to send anyone

home. She guessed that if the school had tried to ban the sexy

talent-show routines, parents would have been the first to complain,

having shelled out for costumes and private dance lessons for their

Little Miss Sunshines.

I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an

exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and

teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue,

comfortable in the existence of a distinction.

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. It’s as if

there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then

Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They

wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for

applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

[cbrahma]

I don't know why my response was deleted, but I find an ISKCON member self-righteous rant about public schools a bit much considering that ISKCON, with its past and pending gurukula scandals, must forfeit that right.