Strollerderby : teenage girls

Teen Girls Fight to Take "Toddlers and Tiaras" Off the Air

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:50:00 GMT

A couple of smart, engaged teenage girls from Niagara Falls have gotten some media attention through their efforts to ban the TLC reality TV show, Toddlers and Tiaras—better known to some as, “Scarring Your Children for Life on National TV.”

The high school seniors started a Facebook campaign to ban the show, arguing that it sexualizes children as young as two and encourages pedophilia. The group quickly attracted close to 5,000 members.

TLC has defended the show, saying they are simply depicting—“from an objective and unfiltered perspective”—something that 100,000 kids take place in each year. For someone like me, the show may appear objective in that it succeeds only in making me even more disturbed by parents who are willing to dress their toddlers up like sexy dolls.

But any time a trend gets major press, there are bound to be people who jump on the bandwagon—plus, the young people whom we’re watching being tortured with hair curlers, fake tans, and fake teeth are real children. Tuning in to watch them paraded around like fashion accessories is implicitly supporting their treatment. As long as there is money to be gained by exploiting young kids in this fashion, it will continue to happen.

If I sound melodramatic in my depiction of what these poor children are made to go through, you probably haven’t had the joy watching the show. So, in a paradoxical effort to support the Niagara girls’ Facebook campaign to ban the show, I present you with a short clip of two-year-old Marleigh (pictured), which you can watch here via Jezebel. On the off chance that you then want to add your voice to the call to take the toddler torture off the air, go here.

Photo: Jezebel

Should Cameras be Allowed in School Bathrooms?

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

How would you feel about sending your daughter to a school that had cameras installed in the girls’ bathroom? Not good, if you’re anything like Anthony White, who withdrew his 14-year-old daughter from a Wales school after he learned that the girls’ bathroom had been equipped with cameras to prevent “horseplay.”

I can understand White's outrage. The school’s response to his concerns about his daughter’s privacy seems so willfully ignorant as to be creepy. Officials claim that the cameras were installed due to reports that soap and paper towels were being misused (the horror!), and the bathrooms are now much cleaner.

"Toilets can be areas where misbehavior occurs," officials calmly explained to the outraged father. True, but I would argue that hidden cameras in teen girls’ restrooms can also be “areas where misbehavior occurs."

Photo: BBC

Shockingly Phallic Hannah Montana Candy

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:50:00 GMT

It’s pretty astounding that Disney had the nerve to blast Annie Leibovitz for sexualizing Miley Cyrus in those Vanity Fair photos. Not that I’m any fan of taking photos of topless 15-year-olds and calling them art, but this, I gotta say, is far worse.

Unless the marketing people who came up with this candy are blind robots, they had to be perfectly aware of what it looks like Miley is about to do to that gummy guitar. They even felt the need to explain what the shapes are on the package, lest people confuse them with something inappropriate, like a phallus.

Well, I’m pretty sure the “microphone” shapes are not going to help matters any.

Photo: Jezebel

Pole Dancing Kits and Other Modern Toys

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Padded bras for first graders, bikini waxes for eight-year-olds, pole dancing kits sold alongside Etch-a-sketches in the toy store—excuse me, but how did this happen? How is it affecting girls' self-image? And, um, what happened to feminism? These are a few of the questions tackled in a recent Salon interview with M. Gigi Durham, author of “The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About it.”

As her book title would suggest, Durham places the burden of sexualizing girls at increasingly young ages squarely on the media’s shoulders. She argues that many companies are looking to exploit tweens’ increasingly significant contribution to the commercial sector by selling them traditional messages about femininity that the older generation of women has by and large rejected.

Interestingly, Durham connects the commercial sexualization of young girls with women’s inability to enjoy their sexuality later on. The abstinence-only sex education programs that have become increasingly prevalent in the Bush years combined with media’s message that “You must look like Barbie to be sexy” creates a very confusing, potentially dangerous backdrop against which young women come to understand their sexuality. Even as teen girls are encouraged to ignore their own sexuality, they’re told, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t have it, spend a lot of money until you get it.”

Durham’s advice to parents? Discuss, but don’t censure. For instance, instead of forbidding your daughter to read Seventeen magazine, ask her what she thinks of that model’s look or that article about how to make boys like you. And she says that this dialogue about media propaganda should start, in modified form of course, as soon as your kids can talk. Anyone out there tried this method?

Photo: Girlshop.com

No Date, No Prom, School Says

Amy Kuras — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:02:00 GMT

Well this is just plain mean. An all-girls high school in Staten Island is making girls bring a date to their junior prom. Or else they can't go.

Back when I was a senior at my all-girls high school, a quintillion years ago (seriously, it's amazing I can even type with my aged, gnarled fingers), the Hunt For The Prom Date was taken as seriously as getting into college. I hadn’t bothered to ask any guy friends to any of the other dances, but I was not missing prom.

So I asked a nice but nerdy guy who was kind enough to scrape up cash for tux rental and a corsage on his college student's budget and then I was less than nice to him. Still a major blot on my karmic record. Almost all of my little posse went with guys we brought just to have a date, and it's a tossup as to who had a worse time, us or them.

See, back in my day, we didn’t think about going with friends. So I think it is fabulous that girls today are independent and smart enough to realize they'd have more fun with a group of friends than with a guy who's there strictly as a date.

This smacks of either homophobia – what if girls on a quasi-date get infected with The Gay? Quelle horreur! – or the apparently epidemic terror of teenage girls left to their own devices. Which I can tell you is a hell of a lot more tame than what even the most platonic of hetero couples might get into on prom night.

Dads Pledge Purity for Daughters. Ewwww.

Amy Kuras — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:03:00 GMT

I don’t know why this phenomenon squicks me out so much: the father-daughter "purity ball." In which girls as young as elementary age and as old as college age spend a night getting dressed up and going dancing with their dads.

Dads, on the other hand, take a pledge to, as this NYT article puts it, "cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity."

Okay, I think I have figured out the squickitude: Why are these men taking ownership of their daughters' sexuality in such a way? If delaying sexual activity were the goal, why aren't these fathers as concerned with their son's virginity as well? Why is that the avenue through which they choose to get personally invested in their daughter's success or failure?

Have they heard of maybe coaching soccer?

What makes it difficult for me to completely condemn this is the stated motivations of many of the men who brought their daughters to the ball. Being a good example themselves, for one. Showing their daughter they cherish her. Being an involved father.

These are all things I can get behind, and I believe the studies that say having a close relationship with their fathers can keep girls away from too-early sexual activity and teen pregnancy. I have always been close with my own dad, and I know that helped me make some smarter choices than I would have otherwise.

But the "daughter's sexuality as father's commodity" troubles me. I'd think the last thing a young girl struggling with issues of sexual maturity would need is the idea that she loses her father's esteem along with her virginity. Or that her main value to her father is remaining "sexually pure."

Exercise During Adolescence Decreases Breast Cancer Risk

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Researchers have long advised middle-aged women that regular exercise decreases the risk of breast cancer. But now they’ve discovered that being active beginning at age 12 substantially affects breast cancer risk as well. In a survey of 65,000 women aged 24 to 42, those who had regularly exercised as teens and young adults decreases had a 23 percent lower chance of getting pre-menopausal breast cancer than those who'd been inactive.

This is sad news if, like me, your idea of exercise in high school was to walk to 7/11 and buy a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of marshmallow Fluff. (And that, folks, is the result of having strict health nuts for parents. Be forewarned.)

If you have daughters between the ages of 12 and 22—the years when regular activity has the greatest affect on pre-menopausal breast cancer risk—you don’t have to go hire them a personal trainer: just encourage them to do at least three hours and 15 minutes of vigorous activity a week, or 13 hours of walking (well, I did go to 7/11 quite a lot). While older women are encouraged to exercise to reduce fat tissue, a main producer of estrogen, the theory behind the benefits of youthful exercise is that physical activity itself lowers estrogen levels. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that once I got seriously into yoga, my boyfriend became much less irritating.

Photo: www.more4kids.info