P*******l
发帖数: 4895 | 1 美国主流阶层确实很保守，还用了prostitutes这个词，呵呵
“Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like t
his—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for the
m to do it with our AmEx cards?”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620458
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Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?
In the pale-turquoise ladies' room, they congregate in front of the mirror,
re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty
hose and gossiping: This one is "skanky," that one is "really cute," and so
forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling
earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look li
ke a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance
floor, where they shake everything they've got under the party lights.
But for the most part, there isn't all that much to shake. This particular g
roup of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their
male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a
cushy East Coast suburb.
In a few years, their attention will turn to the annual ritual of shopping f
or a prom dress, and by then their fashion tastes will have advanced still m
ore. Having done this now for two years with my own daughter, I continue to
be amazed by the plunging necklines, built-in push-up bras, spangles, feathe
rs, slits and peek-a-boos. And try finding a pair of sufficiently "prommish"
shoes designed with less than a 2-inch heel.
All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit o
ur teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being ho
nest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?
I posed this question to a friend whose teenage daughter goes to an all-girl
s private school in New York. "It isn't that different from when we were kid
s," she said. "The girls in the sexy clothes are the fast girls. They'll hav
e Facebook pictures of themselves opening a bottle of Champagne, like Paris
Hilton. And sometimes the moms and dads are out there contributing to it, sh
opping with them, throwing them parties at clubs. It's almost like they're s
aying, 'Look how hot my daughter is.'" But why? "I think it's a bonding thin
g," she said. "It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from t
here."
I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generatio
n of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we no
w regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it
again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex
is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"
We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birt
h control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up. We w
ere also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our repu
tations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find ou
r true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls no
w drowning in regret—I know women of my generation who waited until marriag
e—but that's certainly the norm among my peers.
So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We so
mehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't),
and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews
, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give
away their bodies so readily. We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, G
od forbid, hypocrites.
Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I
don't know one of them who doesn't have feelings of lingering discomfort re
garding her own sexual past. And not one woman I've ever asked about the sub
ject has said that she wishes she'd "experimented" more.
As for the girls themselves, if you ask them why they dress the way they do,
they'll say (roughly) the same things I said to my mother: "What's the big
deal?" "But it's the style." "Could you be any more out of it?" What teenage
girl doesn't want to be attractive, sought-after and popular?
And what mom doesn't want to help that cause? In my own case, when I see my
daughter in drop-dead gorgeous mode, I experience something akin to a thrill
—especially since I myself am somewhat past the age to turn heads.
In recent years, of course, promiscuity has hit new heights (it always does!
), with "sexting" among preteens, "hooking up" among teens and college stude
nts, and a constant stream of semi-pornography from just about every media o
utlet. Varied sexual experiences—the more the better—are the current socia
l norm.
I wouldn't want us to return to the age of the corset or even of the double
standard, because a double standard that lets the promiscuous male off the h
ook while condemning his female counterpart is both stupid and destructive.
If you're the campus mattress, chances are that you need therapy more than y
ou need condemnation.
But it's easy for parents to slip into denial. We wouldn't dream of dropping
our daughters off at college and saying: "Study hard and floss every night,
honey—and for heaven's sake, get laid!" But that's essentially what we're
saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they're still living
under our own roofs.
—Jennifer Moses is the author of "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou" and
"Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom." |
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