And why should any of this matter? Isn’t it just part of the ongoing campaign on the part of the purity police to demonize the sexual revolution and keep our libidos in chains? But whatever your feelings about how permissive or repressed our society is, certainly not in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s ,or 90’s was the sexualization of women this young. No one ever dared depict teen girls en masse as slutty and intended primarily for sexual play. No, there was a line that was drawn. That’s why porn is called Adult entertainment.
Not any more.
Writing in Slate Amanda Marcotte defended things like salacious slogans on teen lingerie by noting that the average American has sex by 17 and seven out of ten are sexually active by 19. Teenagers “need this time to experiment…. there’s no harm giving teenagers a little freedom to do the growing up they need to do.” But portraying teen sex as something utterly harmless flies in the face of the data retrieved by the National Longitudinal Survey or Adolescent Health which found about 25% of sexually active girls to be depressed all, most, or a lot of the time, while 8% of girls who are not sexually active feel this way. Suicide rates are also significantly higher for sexually active teens. And this is aside from the risks of pregnancy and STD’s. Sex conjures up the strongest human emotions and it’s intended for the time in our lives when we are mature and strong.
But while sexualizing teens did not rock her boat, Obama’s comments about Harris deeply upset Marcotte. “It’s a shame to have him undermine his enlightened policies with comments that highlight women’s ever-present decorative duties—especially when we know for a fact that such remarks erode women’s opportunities and even their own sense of deserving equality.”
Surely logic would dictate that however misguided the president’s comments they are utterly insignificant compared to the ongoing campaign to make our girls into sexually active women well before it is healthy or appropriate for them to be so.