Montgomery County, Maryland, Chapter of
the National Organization for Women
Mid-June, 2010 Healthy Media for Youth Act
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| SPONSORS: | ||
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) |
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| C0-SPONSORS: | ||
ARIZONA CALIFORNIA DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FLORIDA ILLINOIS KANSAS |
KENTUCKY MASSACHUSETTS MISSOURI NEVADA NEW JERSEY NEW YORK |
OHIO PENNSYLVANIA TENNESSEE TEXAS VERMONT VIRGINIA WEST VIRGINIA |
SPONSORS:
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)
C0-SPONSORS:
ARIZONA
Paul Grijalva (D)
CALIFORNIA
Lois Capps (D)
Judy Chu (D)
Susan Davis (D)
Robert Filner (D)
John Garemendi (D)
Michael Honda (D)
Barbara Lee (D)
Grace Napolitano (D)
Laura Richardson (D)
Linda Sanchez (D)
Fortney Stark (D)
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Eleanor Holmes Norton (D)
FLORIDA
Suzanne Kormas (D)
Debbie Wasserman
Schultz (D)
ILLINOIS
Janice Schakowsky (D)
KANSAS
Dennis Moore
KENTUCKY
John Yarmouth (D)
MASSACHUSETTS
Barney Frank (D)
James McGovern (D)
MISSOURI
Russ Carnahan (D)
NEVADA
Shelley Berkley (D)
Dina Titus (D)
NEW JERSEY
Steven Rothman (D)
NEW YORK
Michael Arcuri (D)
Daniel Maffei (D)
Carolyn McCarthy (D)
Jerrold Nadler (D)
Paul Tonko (D)
Edolphus Towns (D)
OHIO
Marcia Fudge (D)
Mary Jo Kilroy (D)
PENNSYLVANIA
Michael Doyle (D)
TENNESSEE
Steve Chen (D)
TEXAS
Charles Gonzales (D)
VERMONT
Peter Welch (D)
VIRGINIA
Robert Scott (D)
WEST VIRGINIA
Nick Rahall (D)
Little Girls Are Not ‘Single Ladies’
By Paulie Abeles
Last month, YouTube showed a video from The World of Dance Competition in California in which a group of 8- and 9-year-old girls wearing “adult” costumes dance to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” Objections were raised. To view the “Single Ladies” video, go to http://www.popeater.com/2010/05/14/single-ladies-little-girls.
You’ve probably seen the video. The five little girls scamper and prance on-stage with a grace that is at once charmingly coltish and eerily professional. When confronted later by detractors, the mother of one of the girls explained that the group is ‘passionate’ about their dancing, and so it would seem. Evident throughout is a single-mindedness and fixity of purpose rare in a performance of an age group (8) that in school plays across America have to be reminded not to put their fingers in their nose or wave to the audience. Their costumes are an eye-opening combination of a corset-like bra and what has improbably been referred to as a ‘skirt’ --one large satin panty and one (very) small ruffle. And, did I mention the stockings? Black stockings a la can-can. Tres risqué. In case you weren’t getting the message somehow, the colors—black and red-- are archetypically naughty. Consciously or not, you are being put on notice as the girls romp on stage: expect anything; these girls are bad. In the background, a song by Beyonce scolds a jealous lover to a heavy backbeat:
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Don’t be mad once you see that he want it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Oh, oh, oh.
The pronouns are suggestive; ‘you’ and ‘he’ are the admiring males. But they don’t want a ‘her’ or ‘me’—they like ‘it’. The 1920’s “It” girl (who had ‘ it’), has, in 2010, simply become—it. What ‘it’ is, in this burlesque of a dance routine, is never in doubt. These eight-year-olds are peddling sex; and their dance routine is nothing more or less than the practiced bump and grind of pre-pubescent pole dancers without the pole.
What is most disturbing, is that these five little girls have now flipped their hair, wagged their fannies, licked their lips, and rotated their pelvises like gyroscopes for an audience of over two million viewers on YouTube alone. As Dr. Phil commented, “If we had a way to track pedophiles clicking on to this YouTube video, I bet you it is Grand Central Station.” And that, after all, is the point most people wonder about. Where were the parents? they ask, as if these kids were heroines of a Victorian tale, their parents shipwrecked and unknowing when their children were being exploited.
Curiously, 34 percent of people who voted in an online poll found nothing inappropriate about either the dance routine or the costumes. That percentage almost certainly includes the parents of these girls, who universally express shock and dismay that their judgment is being called so freely into question. After all, as one of the fathers told one of the television news programs, “She doesn’t even really know what she’s doing.” Which begs the question: she might not, but doesn’t he?
Last year Newsweek ran a ‘Special Report’ entitled “Generation Diva: How Our Obsession with Beauty is Changing Our Kids.” I had the opportunity to speak with the author, Jessica Bennett, on my radio show “Sins of Omission” and I was dazzled by some of the statistics she quoted: 43 percent of 6-9 years olds wear lipstick or gloss, 38 percent use hairstyling products, and 12 percent use cosmetics. Currently 8-12 year old girls spend $40 million dollars a month on beauty products. But it’s not just tweens that are being sexualized. The article begins by describing an episode in the TLC series “Toddler & Tiaras” in which a two-year-old looks in the mirror applying lipstick and blush as her mother applies self-tanner to the child’s legs. These children are so elaborately coifed with false hair and false lashes and outrageous costumes that they look more like drag queens than little kids. The girls, their mothers all insist, love it. A word the mothers use a lot is ‘competitive’—ordinarily a good thing. But the fact that these pint-sized prima donnas are competitive only with other little girls — and only about a fantastically created, entirely unnatural ‘beauty’ -- seems not to trouble them.
We have only ourselves to blame. In 2006, a small independent film made for a thrifty $18 million became a critically acclaimed hit, ultimately nominated for five Oscars (it won two). I refer, of course, to “Little Miss Sunshine”— the improbable tale of a plain and slightly rotund little girl who dreams of entering a beauty pageant. In what plays as a feel-good flick, Olive (played by Abigail Breslin in a fat suit) scandalizes the pageant officials, parents, and other contestants when she performs a strip-tease taught to her by her recently deceased (formerly heroin addicted) grandfather to the song “Super-Freak”— thereby thumbing her nose at all the perfectly coifed, immaculately spray-tanned, unliberated contestants. As officials try to remove Olive from the stage, the rest of her dysfunctional family joins her on the stage, validating her performance and exposing the other girls as the real “freaks.” Or so you’re supposed to think. The strange irony that a little girl is somehow supposedly “liberated” by undressing to the scrutiny of a roomful of adult strangers -- appears not to have troubled people.
Naturally, I hated the whole thing. But as I’ve thought about this issue, I’ve come to believe that much of it comes down to the fact that our little girls grow up with different role models than our boys do. Boys are impressed by athletes like Michael Phelps and Tiger Woods; girls pattern themselves after Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus. By inference, our boys might end up smoking a bong, or cheating on their wives. Girls, however, arguably, absorb a more dangerous message-- that revealing outfits and pole-dancing are their paths to attention, power and control. In its most simplistic sense: powerful men exploit others; powerful women exploit themselves.
“Single ladies,” indeed.
Paulie Abeles is the host of “Sins of Omission” which airs every Monday at 9 pm and is one of the most popular shows on Internet radio. Listen to it at www.blogtalkradio.com/nqr”Sins of Omission”
Miss USA Pageant Puts Porn on a Pedestal
By Caryl Rivers
Women's eNews commentator
The Miss USA pageant, in case you missed this news shocker, is offering Web photos of contestants featuring what might be called stripper chic. The young women pout and preen in fishnet stockings, bustiers and lots of cleavage.
Donald Trump, owner of the Miss Universe organization, of which Miss USA is a part, defended the photos to Entertainment Weekly on May 11. “We are in a different age. They are a little bit sexy but I’ll tell you what – everybody’s watching, so I have no problems with it,” he said. “If you look at Miss America, it’s now off network television – and we’re doing better than ever, so I really have no problem with it.”
That kind of money spawns all kinds of reasons to ignore the negative consequences. An April 2009 national high-profile story about a young women murdered in Boston by a man she had solicited on Craigslist might have seemed like good grounds to put the site’s erotic ads on pause. But no such cleanup effort appears to have arrived. Craigslist is expected to improve its profitability 22 percent this year, due to the personal ads.
Potentially Dangerous
Could this be actually dangerous? Yes if, for one thing, it encourages young women to place erotic ads in the personals section. But there’s also a more generic danger.
In a major report on girls in 2007, the American Psychological Association found the media emphasizing young women’s sexuality “to a stunning degree.”
It found that if girls learn that behaving like sexual objects gains approval from society and from people whose opinion they respect, they may begin to “self-sexualize”; in fact, to become their own worst enemies as far as their health and well-being are concerned.
While there’s been a commendable trend for women to develop healthy positive attitudes toward their own sexuality – undoing centuries of deep cultural prohibitions in all parts of the globe – the pendulum swing to hyper-sexualization carries its own perils.
Research links hyper-sexualization with three of the most common mental health problems of girls and women: depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem. And, boys as well as girls can internalize the idea that girls are supposed to behave like sex objects. Boys exposed to sexualized portrayals of girls may be more prone to commit acts of harassment.
What’s needed – as soon as possible – is curricula in our schools that examine the rapid growth of these harmful images and strategies [and help] both girls and boys to resist them. (www.womensenews.org, 6-11-10, reprinted with permission)
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women.”
Numbed to the Pain of Others
By Mary Bailey
For a long time now, some of us have been concerned that young people are becoming inured to the pain of others. Recent news accounts have brought to our attention that high school and college students are “sexting” and humiliating their classmates, usually female. But for me, the problem began years ago with “Garfield,” the cartoon cat who enjoys tormenting Odie, the cartoon dog -- a story line that diverged dramatically from the usual funny papers of my youth. Garfield and siblings now crowd the field of entertainment and are a far cry from a cartoon I remember from an earlier period that also provoked a child’s wicked laugh: a woman with vicious smile and a reaching hand saying, “I’ll just take that last brownie.”
Since Garfield emerged on the scene, there has been a ballooning of entertainment for children and teens that flirts with the sadistic. In fact, since the 1970s two or three generations have been raised on Garfield-style soft sadism. So, surely there are some effects, but what are they and where are they being studied?
13,737 personality tests
One study tackling the question was presented at the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting in May 2010. Conducted by Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan, the study found that Facebook, MySpace and crude TV reality shows were major forces in college students’ increasing “narcissism and ability to ignore others’ pain.”
Professor Konrath and her team analyzed the personality tests of 13,737 college students (mean age 20) over the past 30 years. They found that “[c] ollege kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait,” Konrath said.
Between 1979 and 2009, the students took the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a test that looks at a subject’s emotional response to the distress of others and ability to imagine another’s perspective. They were asked to agree or not with statements such as, “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, students who scored higher in empathy were more likely to carry a stranger’s belongings, let someone ahead of them in line, look after a friend’s pet, or give money to a homeless person. But by 2009, students’ empathetic concern had dropped 48 percent and imagining another’s perspective had fallen 34 percent (which, apparently, averaged out to 40 percent). Especially after a big drop in 2000, the students were less likely to agree with statements “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”
The large decrease in empathy after 2000 coincided with the growth of online communications and social networks, the researchers found. These new environments physically distance communicators and “create a buffer between individuals, which makes it easier to ignore others’ pain, or even at times, inflict pain upon others.” Also, noted a team member, “a growing body of research…is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.” (Toronto’s Globe and Mail, 6-1-10 and The Washington Post, 5-31-10)
Empathy, where art thou?
Empathy is based upon a network of brain areas that are responsible for interpreting the thoughts and feelings of others, says science writer and Rhodes Scholar Jonah Lehrer in “How We Decide.” Humans and most social primates possess a primitive morality best described as “me not hurt you,” at least regarding one’s own kind. This brain-centered morality is evolutionarily favored because it helps keep us alive.
But this innate morality can be violated by an impersonal, crude, or violent environment. In his chapter on the moral mind, Lehrer describes young soldiers’ moral emotions under wartime conditions, with implications for any situation calling for a moral decision. During World War II, Lehrer reports, U.S. Army Brigidier General S.L.A. Marshall surveyed thousands of soldiers immediately after they’d been in combat, and he discovered that less than 20 percent shot at the enemy, even when they were being attacked. “At the most vital point of battle,” Marshall observed, “the soldier becomes a conscientious objector.”
After Marshall’s findings were published in 1947, the Army realized it had a serious problem and revamped its training in order to increase its “ratio of fire.” It endlessly drilled new recruits in simulated killing. The idea was to desensitize the soldiers so they would shoot reflexively, instantly, and automatically. The military also turned increasingly to battlefield tactics such as long-range artillery and high-altitude bombing in order to obscure “the personal cost of war.” (Drones, anyone?)
“These new training techniques and tactics had dramatic results,” Lehrer wrote. Several years later, when Marshall was serving in the Korean War, he found that 55 percent of soldiers were now firing their weapons. Later still, in Vietnam, the ratio of fire became almost 90 percent. “The army had managed to turn the most personal of moral situations into an impersonal reflex,” Lehrer said. “Soldiers no longer felt a surge of negative emotions when they fired their weapons.”
Losing our touch
Sobering, isn’t it? Despite the fact that our moral system is innate and deeply imbedded in our brain’s evolution, it can be overridden by steady indoctrination. Decisions to sext-message a humiliating photo of a classmate or to bomb a town of innocent civilians require first tamping down one’s moral misgivings over harming others. The military does this to its recruits during basic training. Much of our mainstream culture does the same to the rest of us, only more slowly and entertainingly.
· · · Over the Summer · · ·
The Watchful Eye will not be published during the summer months of July and August. However, we may disregard this custom for breaking news and urgent actions – or, if we can’t keep still any longer.
What Were They Thinking?
Online pornography is not only protected by the First Amendment, it may be good for children, said U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed, Jr. “Perhaps we do minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection,” he said. (Wash Post 3-23-07) In this, he echoes U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner who un-banned sales to young people of video games such as “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” because “to shield children right up until the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming, and would leave them unequipped to deal with the world as we know it.” These judges accept the onslaught of sexually violent and aggressive images available to children and teens because it might be good for them! These are images that invite young viewers to identify with the action being simulated and even to direct the action first-hand. Neuroscientists tell us that if someone – especially a teenager undergoing a natural spurt in brain growth – repeatedly goes through the motions seen on the screen, or even imagines going through them, the part of the brain devoted to the activity enlarges and takes over adjacent areas. Children practicing the skills of aggression and sexual violence can surely contribute someday to “the world as we know it,” but is that the world we really want?
Economic Disaster, Environmental Disaster
And the Sexualization of Girls
By Jill Niebrugge-Brantley
Americans have had many causes for anger and concern in the last two to three years— causes so dramatic as to make an issue like the sexualization of girls seem to some people almost to be “a luxury sort of social problem.” People are both worried and enraged by the economic meltdown and the housing crisis that accompanied it; the bailouts of the big banks and the automobile companies while many small “main street” businesses went bankrupt; the recovery of some of those big players, such as Goldman Sachs, so that the people who caused the problem seem to be the only ones not still suffering from it, and now the enormous tragedy of the Gulf Oil Spill.
Furthermore, following these events have been the ongoing reports of malfeasance among the government officials employed to prevent the various disasters that have overtaken the country. News sources have published that internal investigations show that Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) workers—senior workers who were drawing salaries of $99,000 to $223,000 annually—spent literally hours at work each week using government computers to watch pornography, and their watching seems to have gone up as the economy tanked. The online blog “Politicsdaily” reported cases like: “One unnamed regional staff accountant tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times in a two-week period, the IG report said. Another unnamed worker, a senior attorney, admitted to downloading porn for up to eight hours a day -- so much that ‘he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office,’ the Inspector General's report said.” http://www.politicsdaily.com/category/scandal/) The New York Daily News reported that “An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a single month from visiting ‘sex’ or ‘pornography’ sites, but still managed to amass a collection of ‘very graphic’ material by using Google to bypass the SEC’s internal filter. He wound up with a 2-week suspension” (Istandora@nydailynews.com). Similarly, Jake Sherman of Politico revealed that employees of the Minerals Management Service, the people who were supposed to monitor Gulf oil drilling, were engaged in garnering large personal favors from the companies they were supposed to be regulating, doing drugs on government time, and exchanging some 300 e-mails with links to pornographic sites (http://www.politico.com/index.html, 5-25-10).
With the United States and the world facing both severe crises and the failure of elected officials to do their duty, what can justify giving attention right now to the sexualization of girls? The answer is that these crises, these truly monstrous events, are not unrelated to the ongoing social practice of the sexualization of girls.
The answer was pointed to some years ago in a prescient essay by Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic,” in her collection Sister Outsider (1984). What all these events have in common is that they are linked by a prevalent and pervasive misuse of the erotic in our culture. Lorde (1984: 54) argues that we have as a culture have misunderstood and misdefined the erotic, limiting it to experiences around genital sexuality: “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” and “confused . . . with its opposite, the pornographic.” But the erotic for Lorde is much larger than sexuality, which is one form it may take. The erotic is about the way we experience a life happening; it is, she writes, “an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having exercised the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves” (1984: 54). This internal sense of satisfaction can come to us in many ways—gardening, cooking, writing, swimming, singing and also, in an ideal world, doing our daily jobs. The essence of the erotic is that we lose ourself in the doing, we blend fully with the experience, we flow, we feel as actress Maria Schell said of peace, “that time does not matter as it passes by.”
In Lorde’s argument, that is just the reason that a world defined by an ever-expanding quest for profit resists this full sense of the erotic and wishes to package it to people as existing only in sexual encounters or their sham in pornographic viewing. Because if people are really in touch with the full meaning of the erotic in their lives, as a fullness in the moment, they will want that experience in all aspects of their life—in their work, in their education, in their civic encounters, in their leisure, in their experience of art—and that demand will make them unsatisfied with bureaucratic time-serving and work done not for its own sake but purely for profit.
The sexualization of girls is one part of a larger cultural pattern that seeks to buy people off as cheaply as possible, to deny them the erotic and to give them instead the pornographic. The government employees who failed the country were caught up in a system that sells sexual (mis)adventure or pleasure as the reward of work and denies one the real reward which is pleasure in the doing. But the erotic is not a reward; it is the thing itself. Resisting the sexualization of girls is one step in resisting a corruption that urges us constantly to see what we can get away with rather than what we can aspire to. That millions of citizens, that the wildlife and sea life of the Gulf and beyond have now had their fate determined in part by a bunch of sad men staring at a computer screen, hoping the pornographic can give them the erotic, should make us all care about the issue of the sexualization of girls. The sexualization of girls is tied to a larger cultural pattern that diminishes us all by denying the ultimate worth of immediate daily life, of doing our jobs well, and insists that to prove ourselves successful we must seek cheap, illicit thrills—like watching porn at work.
We need to remember that we have the right—and the duty—to find fulfillment in our everyday life. And if we live in a culture that denies that, we need to think about changing that culture.
Sightings
Last month, Montgomery County NOW protested the reduced sentence for child molesting a 4-year-old girl. Five years ago, Jason Lay, then 21, sodomized the daughter of his girlfriend, repeatedly forcing the child to perform fellatio. At the original hearing, prosecutor Karla Smith described Lay as a time bomb. Nevertheless, Judge Eric Johnson cut Lay’s sentence almost in half -- from 30 to 16 years, which will include the five years Lay has already served. This means, noted The Washington Post, that Lay “will be eligible for parole in 2013, after just eight years in prison—and before his 30th birthday.” On May 18, NOW members stood outside the Circuit Court House in Rockville chanting “No Break for Child Rape.” Lay will serve eight years, noted one sign, but the victim will “serve a life sentence healing the damage.” “This is a horrible injustice,” said Montgomery County NOW action vice president Lara Wibeto. “It seems Judge Johnson is more concerned about the rapist than the child.”
Because he could. Artist Louise Bourgeois died last month at 98. A driving force behind her lifelong work was her father’s betrayal of his paternal role. No, he did not sexually molest her, but he did the next best thing -- for a decade he had sexual relations with Louise’s teenage tutor and close friend. “That sense of betrayal and dysfunction would crop up throughout Ms. Bourgeois’s work,” wrote Michael O’Sullivan. In 1974, for instance, she created a sculptural piece of a dismembered man laid out on a dinner table entitled “The Destruction of the Father.” (Washington Post, 6-1-10)
“Three different moral streaks run through American culture and history,” writes James A. Morone, chair of Brown University’s political science department. The first and “most powerful” tradition is Puritanism, which holds that national virtue is necessary for national greatness (argued by Ronald Reagan). The second moral tradition is republicanism, with its contempt for decadent political establishments inherited from the American Revolution (Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). Currently, says Morone, conservatives have seized upon these two strong moral traditions, while “there is an eerie silence on the left.” The third moral strain -- social justice -- once defined American liberalism (Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson), Morone says, but not anymore. He says today’s liberals should return their focus “from individual sinners to communal wrongs,” and worry “less about teen sex” and “more about ministering to our neighbors." (Wash Post 5-23-10) We disagree. To those of us who worry that our culture is sexualizing children at ever younger and younger ages, this is not some silly issue about “individual sinners,” but a “communal wrong” calling for social justice – ed.
Food for thought. “For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing -- though it has also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so that they could get rich fast, and they have -- and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.” (Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, 5-27-10)
This your first issue of The Watchful Eye? Maybe it’s a good time for us to print our formal Mission Statement, to wit: “The purpose of the Sexualization of Girls Project is to make the transition from childhood to adulthood healthier and safer for girls. It aims to increase awareness of the unprecedented sexualizing of girls pervasive in the American culture and to motivate the public to redress this trend. Girlhood is a time for developing one’s identity. Girls should not be overwhelmed by messages that force an excessive concern with sexuality. Rather, a broad spectrum of people should work to build a culture that fosters girls’ safety, health, and personal identity.” Each month since our inception in March 2010, Montgomery County NOW has emailed “TWE” and posted it on its web site. The site also lists several of our articles. If you’d like to catch up on our reports and discussions, please visit www.mcmdnow.org.
This newsletter does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Organization for Women
P.O. Box 2301, Rockville, MD 20847-2301