Bratz at the Beach

And nothing is going to change it. Once a cultural landslide starts it does not stop.

Congratulations to you and your families liberation from the idiot box. 3 years free and counting!

Maybe Ms. Daum should have gone to a MENSA convention. Imagine finding drunkenness and debauchery on a beach during Spring Break! Who would have thought?!?

Regarding the role of the free market and libertarianism, "religious folk" supposedly make up more than 80 percent of the US population. So one would think that in such a society, the free market would reflect the values of this overwhelmingly religious nation.

But, somehow, it doesn't.

Rod suggests that 'the left' is to blame. I suggest he look a little more closely at that 80%.

Rod, I've gone around the angry circle on this topic too many times, and not just on your blog. I'm going to skip the anger over specifying "feminism" in the list of blame -- and I hasten to add that the list not only should be made and discussed, but that somehow consequences be visited upon its members -- because feminism started out as a completely positive and constructive entity: a woman is her own person, and no one can take that away from her.

Where everyone, of whatever label you care to use, has failed women is in the combination of two things: the backlash (stipulating the deserved/undeserved argument) against asserting female personhood, and the incredibly stupid oversight around the cultural aspects that have always been embedded in feminine identity, but became a detriment because it involves profit.

So, that covers culture and materialism. I am a feminist willing to criticize feminism, Rod. All I ask is that you (specific and general) make an effort to get beyond the backlash aspect (the blame-fest) and work with me on getting some constructive changes made. After the TV, I suggest we go after fashion and makeup. Other items to follow will come to mind, I'm sure.

"I'm going to skip the anger over specifying 'feminism' in the list of blame ..."

Me, too. I'm heading straight to patriarchy. How did our kindly forefathers do us wrong? "Manifold evils?" Those evils are beginning to look positively quaint. I'm getting the vapors ... I'd better sit down.

Rod, you might want to rethink this Great Lenten Orthodox fast from sex thing. The slutty girlz are looming entirely too large in your imagination. This post borders on the pornographic. I would advise any young man who truly wishes to keep his mind spotless and pure to turn his eyes away from it and the lurid pictures it evokes.

Rod: I do commend you for dropping the television; I was rather ashamed of some of the withdrawal symptoms I went through when we ditched it. Thank God for the Internet. ;-)

Doug

Feminism is part of it, to the extent that feminism urged women to act like men. Young men were always willing to go have anonymous, drunken sex on a beach somewhere, but until this generation, most women weren't willing to oblige them.

But that's only part of it. Consumerism is a part of it: consuming as many experiences and sensations as possible. The way our culture glorifies consent is part of it too. The only requirement for something to be a moral act now is that the participants are adults and all consent. (And those requirements are weakening.)

To put it plainly, it's fun, and they know no reason not to do it, so why not?

Funny all the work those college, uh, females, went through to "gain confidence", didn't they realize that today practically all they needed was a lower back tattoo?

oops...that was my post about alternative Spring Break activities. Forgot to put my name on it.

Kudos for turning off the TV! My family did it some 12 years ago, and we've never looked back. We use Netflix, and we even manage to put our Netflix account on hold during the major fasting seasons, too. It is so freeing to be in such control of the media coming into our home.

That said, you asked "what went wrong." While there's a lot to say for the cultural drift that's happened in the last thirty years, it goes back farther than that to what made the cultural drift possible in the first place.

It's fair to consider the quandry Grumpy Old Man alluded to. Our culture has created something abnormal called "adolescence" in which you're not quite a child, but you're not quite an adult. It used to be that people were married young, as teenagers, and they had the lasting familial and communal ties to support them in the creation of their new families. People learned about sex solely within the context of being married. I've even heard an argument that such early marriages are not only historical, but also the most "natural" way for humans to do it given the age a woman starts her period. Did you know that a woman gets the MOST health benefits out of bearing children if she does it as a teenager? The younger she is when she bears children, the more radically she reduces her risk for all kinds of future ailments (from osteoperosis to cancer). It's hard to imagine such early marriages happening now. In fact, they make me cringe and want to cry "child abuse!" But, that's only because I still think of a fifteen year old as a girl -- because in our culture, she still is! She's an "adolescent," not bearing any of the responsibilities of adulthood (from keeping a home to earning a living) yet having to cope with all its sexual energy.

Once "adolescence" became an accepted and integrated concept in society writ large, we kept pushing its end further and further back. Now we don't expect people to get married or act like adults until they've graduated from college and have a few years making a career behind them. So, what are they supposed to do with all that sexual energy, particularly when it's being so well nourished and kept aflame by pop culture?

Well, there's been a lot of interesting things said on this thread so far. I'll only add a point or two. First, I really think that the combination of readily available parental money and graduate school really perpetuates adolesence for both men and women. Law school, for instance, is kind of a seemingly surreal, no-consequences atmosphere for some people. We call it high school revisited because of all the interpersonal drama.

Truth be told, and maybe it's just because I can be a serious guy, I notice a lot of immaturity among people in their early to mid-twenties. When I talk to them (and I just turned 27) it sometimes feels like I am speaking with a junior high kid who has ADD. It's hard to explain, but I see this sort of self-absorption and vanity among not only those who live the "wild life" but also some people at religious events--things just manifest themselves in different forms of vice. For the people who are in the so-called "wild life" we get spring break I suppose. For some of the religious, it is in an obsession in having this spiritual gatorade everyday come down from heaven to rev you up, so that your vocation and path in life is always clear. Of course, what they leave out is that success and vocation has an element of realism, relationalism (it's not all about you), and suffering. To the extent these are excluded, the religious young person who falls into this trap is as much a utilitarian as the hedonistic spring breaker (except he may not be committing a mortal sin:)).

Kristen M, do you have any sources you could give for your assertion that it's beneficial for girls to have children at 15? I suspect this is a myth, or at the very least that there are both benefits and disadvantages. Even horse breeders don't send mares to be bred until they have reached maturity. It is certainly true that no young woman should bear the strain of pregnancy until her bones have stopped growing, and I don't think that happens at 15. Until the growth plates close, a woman needs to use her calcium for her own body. She doesn't have the extra resources for the fetus. There's at least one UN study that shows that women who are married young and start childbearing before 19 have worse health outcomes throughout life, as do their children. So a woman who starts childbearing at 15 is not just putting herself at risk, she's also risking having less healthy babies. Early childbearing is also one of the big risk factors for obstructed labor and fistula in Africa. Have you actually raised teenage girls? I have, and I definitely don't think 15 is the ideal age for the responsibilities of motherhood. Fifteen-year-olds, male or female, are just big bodies with a child's head on top. Recent scientific studies show that their brains haven't matured by 15, either.

"Sorry folks, this stuff is very far from new or a recent development."

I don't think the primary concern here for most is that this phenomenon is new. Besides, 1988 was yesterday!

"why do the media, etc., not reflect religious values?"

Original Sin.

Feminism is to blame, along with other cultural forces emanating from the middle of the 20th Century. Many of those forces were cultural and historical, but there was an element of hatred directed against western civilization, patriarchy, and the family, which cannot be denied. The free market is just what it says it is, a free market. It merely reflects what society wants. If you want to take some things off the market, that's a different story, because whatever gets put onto it can be sold and traded.

When you remove sexuality from its traditional role and unleash it in the name of "freedom", this is the result. And this isn't just womens' sexual freedom. All the pictures of scantily clad women and porn stars on CNN didn't get there thanks to women, it's there because men have their sexual freedom as well.

People on the "right" (culturally, not politically) have no place to complain though. Just shut it off. If you abandon the popular culture, it will wither on the vine. Plus, you're making most of the new consumers. But doing it is tough. Sending your kids to private school isn't necessarily enough to get them out of the swamp, because parents who let 8 year-olds watch pornos may also have the money to send their kid to private school. And the latest sociological research confirms what most people already know: who your children socialize with is the greatest factor determining who they will become.

Grumpy Old Man: It would be quite counter-cultural for college-educated folks to encourage their kids to marry and breed early, and to stay married.

Kristin mentions marriage at 15.

GOM, that's the last thing college-educated parents are going to do. A lot of it ties in with health care in this country. Young people are off their parents' insurance at 18 or 19 (or at the end of high school, whichever comes last) unless they go to college, in which case they are insured until 23-26 (depending on the plan.)

Young people w/o a college education are very unlikely to get the kinds of jobs which carry medical insurance. So how are they supposed to pay for those babies they produce - including any possible medical risks like a child with a developmental problem, preterm birth, low birth weight, etc?

All those complications are more common in younger (i.e. under 20) mothers.

Further, I know a fair # of young people with something wrong with them - diabetes, other metabolic disorders, ADD, joint problems, etc. One swallow does not a summer make, but I don't recall this being the case so much when I was that age. I never went to the doctor, except for one or two emergencies, and then the charges weren't outrageous.

That was then, this is now. Turning a young person out into the world without insurance or the means to work for the same is pretty irresponsible, and a possible ticket to bankruptcy.

Kristen, the other problem I have with very young marriage/child bearing is this. Traditionally women have been literally "locked up" by this practice. One reason early 19th c. women's rights developed in New England was because of the large proportion of spinsters. Poorly educated teenage girls stuck at home under the thumb of husband and mother-in-law, saddled with a lot of children - no, thanks.

No one, to my knowledge, has been able to reverse the trend of educated women (4 years college or more) having relatively few children on the average.

I think that I can understand Ms Daum's discomfort attending a spring break. I attended a couple of frat parties in my college day(20 or so years ago), and felt like a social misfit. Spring break brings the heaviest partiers from all over the country together for 1 week of sex, drugs, and unlimited alcohol consumption. Ms Daum is right to be a shocked and appalled by such behavior.

I think that adults are right to point to such behavior and say that something is wrong and to ask questions. However, I think that to say that the answer is to return to the days of Patriarchy is very wrong. Patriarchy is the worst form of society for women and children. Look at how women and children are treated in Muslim societies without feminism balancing the power of the male. Look at how women and children were treated in this country prior to the 1960's. Men could treat women and children however they wanted and be as abusive as they wished, and women and children were powerless to respond. So, we don't have it exactly right. Feminism didn't bring Utopia.

I'm not a man hater, but I really believe that the problem is that men still have too much power in our society. They run the movie and tv industry, and they know that sex sells. Women are exploited to make more money. I believe that many of the big women's magazines have women editors, but I'm wondering who OWNS the magazines. I bet that the editorial staff is reporting to males.

Oprah is a good example of a women who is in control of her life and her destiny. She's a women who understands the power of feminism. People are right to let her and women like her talk to our girls. Prior to feminism, Oprah would have been another little girl being attacked by an uncle in the closet while struggling her whole life to put food on the table.

We, also, see the problems in our society where men have relinquished all power so that they can be good time boys. It's time for our society to make men like that recognize that it's wrong to not take responsibility for family. Blaming feminism won't get us there.

It makes me sad to think that it's been brought home, on this Good Friday, that the dominant religion of the United States isn't a religion at all, but consumerism. We're simply talking commodities here. Sex is the most dominant marketing tool of our culture, so of course it's been sold, and sold, and oversold, to where breast enhancement is no longer a weird gift to give to a young woman for high school graduation. I can't blame young women for being slutty, because they're simply responding to what the market demands, both the overarching American market, but more precisely, what the market of frat boys (the most likely candidates for future success...like it or not, it's true) think they want in a mate. Maybe we're coming full circle with regard to what we primates are doing for mating rituals.

I think feminism falls far down the list of causes.

Growing up in the 50's and 60's sex education went like this: Boys, you arent supposed to ask for sex.
Girls: Boys arent supposed to ask for sex but they will anyway. It is your job to say no. Not really sure we are that much further along in attitudes. Its still the female form we will see in advertising as advertisers have figured out that "hot chicks" ads work on men and women.

Steve

When the house PR broadcaster of the conservative movement--Fox News--is owned by the sleaziest network on broadcast television, Fox, it seems unmistakable that consumerism--the by-product of unregulated capitalism--is the chief problem.

Remove all outside information and (a) they find it elsewhere, (b) they rightfully understand you are not open to honest dialog and educating them, and (c) come to their own conclusions and experiment on their own without benefit of your life experience.

Good luck with that.

I've never understood this approach to parenting. It's lazy and self-defeating.

I used to share your attitude about television; I did not own a tv until I married into it 3 years ago. But I have to say that I have really been enjoying HBO's John Adams series, as well as more low brow programs such as Project Runway. What is the harm in these things? Is it that you think the medium itself is corrupt?

The medium of TV by its nature is distracting, at least, even when the programming is good. Even though there are several good programs on these days, I'm staying without cable and watching those shows through Netflix. There's just something about being able to choose when and how to watch shows that seems to keep them in their proper place in my life. I know with DVRs it should be possible to do the same thing, but I haven't tried that. When i pick a disc out of thousands and wait a day or two for it to show up, you can bet it's going to be something I really want to see instead of just the best thing I could find while flipping channels, and I'm going to save it for "movie time" and fully enjoy it.

On the rare occasions that I watch TV (with rabbit ears) now, like yesterday when the NCAA basketball tournament started, I can't believe how distracting and scatterbrained it is. Commercial breaks seem constant, and many commercials are so stupid or insulting that I can only stand to watch for so long. It's just not pleasant.

I love how no attempt at all is made to hold young men responsible for receiving oral sex from these girls. It's the old, "boys will be boys!" attitude raising it's ugly head again, foisting all the responsibility for chastity onto young women, holding young girls almost solely responsible for the rise in premarital sex. This problem is always viewed through the lens of young women giving oral sex as the problem, not the young men receiving it.

Of course, this double-standard is very old, but you'll forgive me if I'm suspicious of people's motives when I hear "The changing attitudes of girls are responsible for this problem," or "Certain aspects of our culture are warping young women from their true nature-- sugar, spice, and chaste outside of marriage!"

Like this:

"It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature of who we are..."

Well, ideally, EVERYONE'S sexuality would be linked to kindness and trust. I think most people are there or get there, even they have a bumpy start, and that hasn't changed.

What this statement misses is that people are different. People have different personalities, expectations, views of relationships and experiences in their past that color the expression and nature of their sexuality. This includes women.

How anyone thinks they can paint half the human population in such broad strokes is beyond me. Kindness and trust isn't "innate" in women, or men. This is especially true in context of sexuality as well. You learn it.

Women aren't born into the world as gentle, angelic, nurturing figures. They arrive bloody and screaming just like the other half.

Is a coincidence that Lord Karth showed up here about the same time m_david disappeared?

Mary:

Television, being a primarily visual medium, is very good at conveying images. It is no good whatsoever at presenting abstract arguments or discussions, which take place on an oral/aural level. Words engage the higher, Human, reasoning mind. Images work on a more visceral level. Indeed, there is considerable research showing that watching virtually any television produces a shutdown of the higher brain and an increased level of alpha waves (brain waves associated with a brain in a torpid state). The medium isn't so much "corrupt" as "corrupting".

Pyrrho:

The three differences you cite are secondary at best. They have an effect (birth control in particular), I will grant you, but not to the extent that a State-dominated, mass-media economy does. Pre-industrial males could always "light out for the territories", as many mountain men did. In addition, the pre-mass-media social setup allowed traditional institutions to inculcate a moral code that actually supported the idea that limits may be legitimately placed on individual conduct. Modern mass media actively oppose the idea of limitations on individual behavior, as well as providing a constant incentive to social disruption by presenting the consumerist ideal as the only one worthy of emulating.

Sigaliris:

You miss my point. The present State/Corporate-dominated social set-up is so firmly entrenched that it would require a major war or similarly large disruptive event to eliminate it. I say that because the consumerist economy requires the following:

1) a mass medium for widespread advertising and reinforcing the notion of consumption of material goods as the highest social value;

2) financial incentives for the use of the said mass medium on a wide scale (the tax incentives I mentioned earlier);

3) a medium that is primarily VISUALLY oriented; this allows for the greatest diffusion of ideas to the greatest number of people (the "least common denominator", so to speak) in the face of differences in spoken languages and countervailing ideas from more traditional institutions.

This structure, in its turn, requires a particular form of high-tech economy and a particular form of powerful State apparatus to maintain it. (We can discuss this further, if you care to.)

As to your other comments: I have studied post-Revolutionary Russia and Communist China (I accumulated enough credits in the area in college to have taken a degree in Russian Studies) extensively for perhaps 30 years. Also, I have relatives who personally served in the military in post-WW2 Europe and who have related to me their first-hand knowledge of the conditions of that time and place. I stand by what I posted earlier.

It has been, in fact, Human nature to struggle to provide for one's family. This has held true ever since the species became recognizable as Humans. The modern American experiment has been to see if Humans can be reoriented towards immediate and unnecessary consumption and away from devotion to survival of family, House and Line while still preserving their essential humanity. In other words, can Humans handle widespread material prosperity and still be Human ?

I submit that this experiment is failing, and hideously so. Just consider the statistics on population decline in technologically advanced countries. Look at Japan, for example, or Europe. They have had a high level of material prosperity, a widespread mass-media culture---and their birth rates are not even close to replacement level. As to the behavior of those members allowed to live in those cultures----can you honestly look around you and tell me that they are the finest exemplars of this species ?

Connie:

Coincidence it is. You have my sworn word that I have never heard of or associated with "m_david".

Thank you all for your responses, and to Mr. Dreher for providing this fine and well-run forum. I have the honor to remain, as always

Your servant,

Lord Karth

When the house PR broadcaster of the conservative movement--Fox News--is owned by the sleaziest network on broadcast television, Fox, it seems unmistakable that consumerism--the by-product of unregulated capitalism--is the chief problem.

Well, no. America was a bare-knuckle consumerist society when Rupert Murdoch was filling his nappies Down Under, though I readily concede he's a sleazemonger.

But other factors are at work. We've come a long way from Beach Blanket Bingo to The Real Cancun, and it isn't because Americans have discovered television and conspicuous consumption in the interim.

"I dont think...that any system which relies solely on one sex to insure proper sexual conduct is sustainable."

So true, and so much more true for any system that cannot rely on either sex to insure proper sexual conduct.

"If it's really meant to provide another opportunity for men to express their feelings about control and possession and the potential loss thereof, I suppose it would be good to get that out on the table right now and stop wasting time."

I here this a lot when it comes to discussions of sex and promiscuity etc... But let me throw out this question--when it comes to a person's daughters (or their kids in general), don't you think it is natural to want to have some sort of *control* (in a lose sense) over their daughters? When we're talking about offspring, doesn't isn't there a strong instinct to protect and want to disseminate the values about these sorts of things to one's children. I think the way fathers feel about their daughters and sons can be very different. Same with mothers.

While one would hope we hold both to the same standards and try to infuse the same morals--I can tell you that my stomach would churn in circles a lot more if I found a hypothetical daughter of mine doing this sort of thing. I'm not sure that's being possessive, it's just the way the different sexes react to things.

That 2006 Flanagan article is incredibly eloquent. It's written with power and is straight from the heart.

The biggest revolution re: the sexes and social control *wasn't* the sexual revolution of the 1960s. (And yes, believe it or not, there *was* effective birth control in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, way before the Pill.) The biggest revolution was the ability of daughters to leave their families, go out and work, and live on their own.

It happened in the late 19th c., when young women in New England went into factory work in droves. If a young woman was of age, her father legally could not take her earnings or force her to live at home. This was a cardinal change in women's lives, far more significant (IMO) than the political early-feminist movements.

To get an idea of how things were in some parts of "the old country," in Sweden up till the turn of the 20th c., girls were *never* considered free and responsible adults if they were unmarried. They were *always* under the legal authority of their fathers, and then their husbands.

So in a sense industrialization - with its insatiable demand for cheap labor - essentially broke the back of patriarchy, at least in Europe and America. I don't see the genie going back into the bottle anytime soon. Even the most isolated "traditionalist" families still can't maintain that control once their children are 18.

Franklin Evans 3/21/4am Yes!
Sigaliris 3/22/7:45am Amen!
We are the consumers therefore we can change what is consumed, why it is consumed, how it is consumed.
What messages are we giving our children? They don't seem to have changed much--to boys: Women are for your pleasure. They are not you equals. To girls: you matter only to the degree you are attractive to men. To society: sex sells. UGH!
Feminism was meant to change those messages. We need to start saying to both our sons and our daughters--Women are more than the sum of their body parts. A female mind is a terrible thing to waste. Sex is meant to be the last step toward intimacy, an ultimate form of communicating one's value and esteme. Self-control is a virtue; it serves you well in many areas of your life.
Having a parent at home is great. Having two parents involved in thier child's life is even better.
As for girls having babies sooner--the health risks far out weigh the health benefits--mental stress, calcium and iron deficiency, infant and maternal mortality rates.