Goodbye girlhood...

David, great commentary. I saw the Post article too. This is something that's been going on for some time now, unfortunately. BTW, liked your comment on poverty of riches. It reminded me of a great passage from Bryant Myers' Walking With the Poor: "At the end of the day, the poverty of the non-poor is the same kind of poverty as the poor, only differently expressed. The poverty of the non-poor is fundamentally relational and caused by sin. The result is a life full of things and short on meaning. The non-poor simply believe in a different set of lies. The only difference is that the poverty of the non-poor is harder to change. A bank account and abundant diet somehow (I cannot explain it quite satisfactorily) insulate man from coming to feel the primary truth of history. (Koyama 1974, 23). This is what Jesus was trying to say when he compared a rich man getting into the kingdom as a camel trying to go through the eye of a needle."

I think it's pretty tough to tie this one to lack of faith. It seems to me that in a country where a majority of people identify as Christian, and you see this kind of sexualization of youth all over the place, we're not talking about two different groups of people. And there are plenty of kids raised in more secular homes who manage not to fall prey to this. (Anecdotally, I was surprised to find myself going to a movie in a suburb of Houston - the kind of suburb where many, many cars are adorned with Christian stickers, there are lots of churches, and the politics are highly conservative... and the place was swarming with 12 year old girls dressed like prostitutes.) There are practical things to be done. David, congratulations on isolating your daughters from this so they can be little girls, not little customers for whatever someone wants to sell them; that is no small challenge and is a sign of your good parenting. But... perhaps lobbying for some restrictions of advertising to children, with the threat of regulation if the industry doesn't clean up their act, is in order?
I work in marketing (business to business, IT products) and I'm frankly horrifed by what some of my peers do. There are agencies specializing in marketing to kids, and they employ child psychologists to help them figure out how to manipulate children. Given today's media environment and sheer number of marketing messages anyone (of any age) is exposed to, how do you protect your kids from someone trying to sexualize them in order to sell them things?
And when those people are very adeptly playing on natural desires of children - to play at being grown up, to fit in, to know the latest trends - any parent or relative (I'm not a father, but I am an uncle) is utterly outgunned.