The Wild Girls

WARNING: NOT CHILD FRIENDLY MATERIAL

What do a New York Times editorial and Anna Venger have in common?

No, there's no punchline; that wasn't the lead in to a joke. I am actually in agreement with Lawrence Downes who penned a piece for the NY Times entitled "Middle School Girls Gone Wild" in which he describes the school talent show from which he emerged shellshocked:

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....The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

Like me, he finds these antics inappropriate at best for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. I would add that they are inappropriate behaviors for any self respecting female.

My question is: Where do these children learn to behave like that? Have their parents given them lessons? Special classes in school? No? Okay, maybe from other kids, but that begs the question: where did the other children learn?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe life is imitating "art," and that these children-and they are children- have learned to "dance" this way from television, music videos, and movies. Oh, I can here the howls of protest that mere media entertainment doesn't really affect behavior. But let's get real here. We're allowing our children to play in a moral cesspool and then act surprised when they stagger out filthy and diseased. Is this the greater freedom that the women's movement desired, enabling boys to have easier access to sex and encouraging girls to devalue and debase themselves?

Yeah, we've come a long way, baby.