Bride of Frankenstein

Cheetah

Ok, I'm no longer taking entries in the contest. I'll give you a few hours to leave comments voting on all the entries I published over the weekend and then I'll announce the winner of the Seagate Go Portable Hard Drive.

Quick jumps on these posts:

Real Girls' Costumes IV

Real Girls' Costumes V

Real Girls' Costumes III

Real Girls' Costumes II

Real Girls' Costumes

Here's a photo of us: We're Chinese. Picked them up in San Francisco's Chinatown this summer.

I also took a photo of the town's costume contest and here's what I can report.

The little girls were not dressed provocatively or in an overtly sexual way.

There were Princesses, Hannah Montanas, Super Womans, Gabriellas, and Charpeis, Cowgirls and Indians, etc. And while they were very "pretty" and "beautiful" and overtly "feminine" and "girly" - they were also modestly dressed.

Pretty, beautiful and overtly feminine and girly do not equate to "sexy," "provocative," "slutty," "hootchy" or "sexual."

I saw 2 very provocative costumes on older teenagers (their mothers were likely hiding at home in shame and horror) and one inappropriately short minidress on a mother who dragged that black velvet dress from her own adolescence, I'm sure. (I had one in the '90s too.)

I realize my small East Texas town isn't indicative of the whole of America so I'm curious - did you see inappropriately dressed little girls? What about them struck you as inappropriate?

You're probably thinking, "why do we have to choose between abstinence education and protecting our children from hyper-sexual media?

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids very clearly explains that this is not the choice we face, it's the choice we have already made in America.

Why would Republicans push for abstinence-only education and then allow commando marketing to children with a hyper-sexual message?

Because they are not representing your values. They are using your values to get votes and then stimulating the economy by creating access to your children as a marketing target. The fact that the message is a hyper-sexualized one is of no concern to them.

Feminist friends, allow me to introduce you to my Religious Conservative friends. . .

You both have the same goal - raising children with a healthy sexuality - you should both feel betrayed by the way politicians and marketers have exploited your children's sexuality for profit.

So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids really articulated something I'd been feeling for a long time. Do you ever watch The View and want to scream at them - Joy, Whoopie and Elizabeth - all at the same time when they discuss sex education in schools? Joy talking about what it was like to want to do it with your fiance 40 years ago, Whoopie saying she wants to teach kids to put condoms on bananas, and Elizabeth wanting everyone to live in a Norman Rockwell painting, with Jesus playing the harp, but where she can wear $500 low-rise designer jeans.

Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne gave me a much better understanding of my frustration when I watch those discussions.

We're all missing the point. While we're arguing about whether to tell kids about sex - marketers told them already. Marketers have an organized strategy to actively use every single opportunity they have to SELL sex to kids.

Because they want kids to have sex?

No silly. They don't give a flip whether kids do or don't have sex.

They just know that sex sells - even to small children - sex sells.

So while we're having our analytical and sometimes heated discussion the politicians turned marketers lose on kids.

Marketers have said, "parents and educators are better distracted anyway" and they proceed to sell clothing, dolls, toys, games, video games, actual sex and pornography, television shows, credit cards, beauty products, school suppolies, easy readers featuring toy hookers, and barbie doll-knock offs as strippers to kids using their own sexuality. They are selling a sexual message in children's books, in their commercials, in their video games, on their television programs and with their toys.

Every ad, every image, every message is hardwiring our children's brains to connect sex and their own sexuality and sexual value with objects.

Did you catch that? Their goal is to connect the child's sexuality and sexual emotions and sexual triggers in their brains to the objects and products they sell.

The ability to buy the products and wear them and look like them becomes an expression of the child's sexuality. The marketing message is encouraging children to be erotically turned on by labels and products that promise to make them happy. "To buy our products is hot," is the message they sell to children. To the point, where women are exchanging body parts for objects (boob job). (ie. Dr. 90210 is sexy advertising for plastic surgeons).

People aren't sexy. Prada is sexy. People aren't hot, the Abercrombie they wear are hot. People don't have value, their Coach bags have value. Boobs aren't sensual, silicone implants are sensual.

In the meantime, we're giving kids a naive little abstinence-only curriculum in a 45 minute class. The message of which seems entirely irrelevant, never mind statistically ineffective, in the face of the how incredibly successful this media onslaught on our children's sexuality is.

Hello, America! Abercrombie & Fitch bought 10 million dollars in advertising to name the Emergency Room at Columbus Children’s Hospital, tying the the label to both inappropriate sexuality and children's health simultaneously. As the blogger of Canoe Room points out - parental protests against Abercrombie & Fitch's sexualized ads have served only to make the brand more attractive to kids.

There are laws that prevent Marlboro from advertising to children - why not laws that prevent corporations with a similarly damaging sexualized message?

Religious Conservative friends, I'd like you to meet my Feminist Friends.

You both have the same goal, you just have slightly different motives.

Maybe we should try having the same conversation and devise an effective strategy to deal with a real and well-financed threat to our children.

Educators and Parents should read So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids for a well-researched, completely thorough, understanding of today's Sexualized Childhood.

Tune in tomorrow or subscribe to my RSS feed for more on solutions for Today's Sexualized Childhood.

Monday's story: So Sexy So Soon: Sexualized Childhood.

For more on how our children are being viewed as marketing targets visit Parents for Ethical Marketing.

Image Source: Canoe Room, by way of MomoLogic.

I'm currently reading this book for review, I'll let you know what I think about its' strategies for parents when I finish.

We all know how objectification works, some men see women as an object for their sexual pleasure.

But, what happens when girls and women begin to see themselves as an object for men's sexual pleasure?

The Association for the American Psychological Association
(APA) calls this self-objectification and/or self-sexualization in the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls.

There's a host of evidence that when girls are exposed to too much media that they begin to view themselves less as three dimensional human beings and more as sexual objects. When this occurs, psychologists note the increase of:

* eating disorders

* low self-esteem

* depression or depressed mood

One interesting study noted that teenage girls from Figi had great body image and self esteem - until they were exposed to Western television. Once exposed, they became preoccupied with weight and body shape, purging behavior (throwing up) and body disparagement. Prior to television the Figian culture emphasized a robust body shape and based notions of identity not on body, but on family, community and relationships. The transition between healthy self-image to the increase of eating disorders was only 3 years.

Self-objectification is also directly linked to "diminished sexual health" among adolescent girls. One study found that when girls viewed their own bodies as objects for male pleasure condom use and sexual assertiveness, (saying "no") decreased.

Another study found that "undergraduate women who frequently watched music videos or read women's magazines, who attribute greater realism to media content, or who identify strongly with popular TV characters were also more accepting of sexually objectifying notions of women."

Accepting these sexually stereotypical and objectifying views manifested in negative attitudes toward breastfeeding and negative attitudes about normal body functions like menstruation and sweating.

When I read the APA's definition of self-objectification and self-sexualization it was like a mini-awakening for me.

That explains why, as a teen and young adult, I allowed boyfriends to treat me as their sexual object or plaything. It explains why I crossed many of my own sexual boundaries and didn't want to object "for fear of being rude" on several occasions. It explains why I allowed boys and men to make inappropriate comments about my body and its development from even the earliest age - heck, I didn't even know was "allowed to object."

Do you think you've ever self-sexualized or self-objectified?

Do you worry about this with your daughter?

Read 10 Antidotes to Self-Objectification and Sexualization of Girls for ways to prevent your daughter from objectifying her own body.

Empowering Girls: Marketing Boundaries

APA Reports Sexualization of Girls Devastating
Taekwondo For Girl Power

By Tracee Sioux

I have been a little surprised at the reaction to a vaccine for HPV (human papillomavirus virus), which causes cervical cancer.

I suppose I thought most of the planet, like me, have spent some time hoping that mad-scientists will eventually eradicate cancer. So, when I heard they had an actual vaccine, Center for Disease Control , Approximately 20 million people are currently infected with HPV. At least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives. By age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired genital HPV infection. About 6.2 million Americans get a new genital HPV infection each year.

My brain is trying to wrap itself around the fact that 80 percent of ALL women will acquire a form of HPV.

Hypothetically, this means out of my grandmother, mother, self, daughter and sister only one of us will NOT be infected. I’m going guess my 83-year-old grandmother might be the safe one.

You know what the whole argument feels like to me? It feels like the same hypocritical puritanical judgment we have always inflicted on our girls and their sexuality.

If you weren’t a slut you wouldn’t get cervical cancer. Serves you right!

However, in this case, it is patently unjustifiable. A girl’s virtue will not keep her from contracting HPV. There is a large population of girls at risk of contracting HPV through cheating or abuse.

A woman is at risk for dying of cervical cancer if she has the bad luck of being married to an adulterer.

* Though they vary from study to study, the most widely accepted figures indicate that between 50 and 70 percent of married men (between 38 and 53 million men) have cheated or will cheat on their wives, according to Ruth Houston, the author of “Is He Cheating on You?-829 Telltale Signs.”

Sexual abuse victims are also at risk of contracting HPV, which can develop into cancer.

* During FFY 2005, an estimated 899,000 children in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect. Approximately 9.3% of them were victims of sexual abuse, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Department, 2005 Child Maltreatment report.

* Twenty percent of teenage girls and young women have experienced some form of dating violence, according to the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women.

Not requiring the vaccine is unfairly denying basic healthcare to ALL girls period. According to the intercourse is not required to contract the HPV virus. One should assume that many young girls participate in foreplay or sexual experimentation for years prior to having actual sex.

Condoms or other contraceptives do not prevent the spread of HPV because an exchange of fluids is not required to pass the virus from person to person. HPV can be spread from skin to skin and condoms do not cover all contagious areas.

The only thing to protect girls from cervical cancer is the Gardasil HPV vaccine. The vaccine prevents 70% of cervical cancer. Other drug companies are developing similar vaccines which may be more or less effective.

What breaks my heart is the inevitable image of a woman in her early 20s finding out that she may die or never be able to conceive because she contracted this virus. Maybe she had sex with her steady boyfriend in high school and they broke up and she married her college boyfriend and they became a typical young married couple who goes to church every Sunday. Oh, but instead of wearing a scarlet letter “A” she gets to fight cancer. With chemotherapy, hair loss, infertility and possible death.

This cancer kills around 26% of women who are diagnosed with it.

Maybe her parents are people with conservative family values, or maybe her insurance company won’t cover it because the state doesn’t require it to enter school, or her parents are just ignorant and irresponsible.

Either way, no girl deserves to die of cancer because she had sex, not even a promiscuous girl. The punishment, and really lets just admit it’s punitive to deny someone basic healthcare in an attempt to prevent sex, is not equal to the crime.

This scare-tactic method of encouraging abstinence has been ineffective in the face of AIDS, pregnancy and every other sexually transmitted disease. Why, would we think that it would be effective just because cancer is in the forbidding sentence? Adolescents have no sense of mortality. They have no sense of future long-term consequences. It’s the curse and blessing of the teenager that they are blissfully unaware that they will ever be 30.

Nor is cervical cancer or HPV a natural consequence or an unforeseeable circumstance from having sex anymore. No more than having babies is a natural consequence of sex. I have sex all the time, but we have chosen to have only two children and have used information and scientific advancement to prevent the natural consequence of children. Now that we know what causes cervical cancer and we know we can vaccinate girls against it, then there is deliberate harm in withholding the vaccine. Now that we have the knowledge and access to a vaccine, cervical cancer is now a natural consequence of neglecting the health of our girls.

I don’t agree with the argument that it’s the parents’ right to choose whether or not their daughter should be vaccinated. I believe it is every girl’s absolute right to be protected from cervical cancer. The only way to ensure that a girl has access to her right to basic health is for the government to require the vaccination.

The reason all vaccinations are required to enter school is to prevent the spread of communicable diseases that pose a significant health threat to society. HPV and cervical cancer represent a significant health threat to ALL girls, promiscuous or not, and HPV is a very wide-spread communicable disease.

The reason the immunization should be given upon enter the sixth-grade is because a lot of sexual experimentation occurs in junior high school. By high school, for a lot of our girls, it’s already too late. By the time a girl reaches 26, coincidentally around the same time she’s considering marriage, so many girls have already contracted the virus the CDC doesn’t even recommend the vaccine.

The reason parents, in general, are not a good option to guard their daughters’ health in the case of HPV and cervical cancer is that parents usually aren’t the first to know about their daughters’ sexual activity. If seven out of 10 girls have sex by the time they are 17, it’s reasonable to assume that six of those girls’ parents don’t know about it.

Texas was the first state to confront the issue. They confronted it with puritanical judgment and a complete denial of reality.

I encourage you to write your legislature, governor and health department and request that the vaccination be required for girls in your state.

If you’re a parent, please be pro-active and responsible for your daughter’s future health by getting her immunized against the HPV virus. This is a prime teachable moment to talk to young girls about the potential consequences of sexual experimentation in an honest and open way. I really believe if we are open and honest with girls about sex, instead of punitive, forbidding and secretive then we will be much more effective in encouraging them to make better decisions about their sexuality.

By Tracee Sioux

Everyone has heard this urban legend . . .

I have a cousin (or uncle or brother or dad or son) who was only 18 (19, 20, 21, 22) and his girlfriend was 14 and she totally seduced him and then when he broke up with her she had him arrested for statutory rape. Now he’s on the sex offender list for the rest of his life and won’t ever be able to work with children and I don’t think that’s fair at all. I mean, she totally wanted to do it and she was seducing him. He’s a good guy and this just shouldn’t follow him all his life. It’s not fair, she's just a slut.

Yeah, I’ve got that cousin too. He’s my favorite cousin, always has been. And it sucks for him that he’ll have to pay for his mistake all his life.

And I’ve been that 14-year-old girl.

Now I won’t claim to know what went on in every single one of those rooms with your "innocent" uncle, brother, father, son or cousin. Perhaps if you knew the details you would still believe he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

I’d have to fiercely disagree.

I’m 33 now and I’ve started volunteering as a mentor with four 14-year-old girls.

Here’s what I have learned THEY ARE CHILDREN!

I occurs to me now that no matter how much I would have sworn that I was ready for love and sex, that I was “mature” and should be legally allowed to consent to sex with a boy four or five years my senior – I was a naive and delusional child. I thought I was so grown up. I thought I was so ready for all of adulthood.

Children make bad decisions, it’s in their nature. Not to mention that I had zero sexual education and was therefore unprepared to make any kind of educated decision about whether or not I was ready.

What I really was ready for was for a boy to like me. I was ready for a little romantic involvement. I was ready to experiment with my self as a sexual being – preferably with boys my own age who were also into experimenting with the new world.

My innocence should have been protected by the law, by my parents (they tried to talk me out of it, but did not involve the law), and most of all by that 19-year-old pervert who spoon-fed me seductive crap about how "mature" I was and how "different" I was from girls my age and how he preferred hanging out with me to "high maintenance" girls his own age. READ: You're an easy target and girls my own age are too hard to f***.

Looking back I know that in his innermost being that guy was a coward. He didn’t dare date girls his own age because they were mature enough not to take his crap. Had it been a severely punishable offense that was frequently (rather than almost never) prosecuted he wouldn’t have had the guts to pursue a child for his perverted and deviant hobby.

My point here is that your uncle, brother, cousin, father or son is not entitled to a free pass at our teenage daughters. As an adult he should know better and should be held to a higher standard than a child in regards to sexual responsibility.

For much too long we have been offering our teenage daughters as some sort of sacrifice on the alter of a man’s uncontrollable (what crap!) need for sexual gratification.

Our teenage daughters deserve legal and social protection. They deserve to be able to experiment with their provocativity and sexuality without an adult man taking this as a viable invitation or seduction. My five-year-old often experiments with looking sexy or provocative – all little girls do. This doesn’t give anyone permission or a legitimate excuse to molest her. Not now and not when she is 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 or17.