A father complains about the dances girls perform at a junior high talent show. (Via Ann Althouse):
The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.
They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
I know I'm middle-aged, but it is amazing to me what pre-adolescent girls are being told is normal behavior. At least when Starlight Vocal Band sang about Afternoon Delight, they used a few euphemisms.
Worse than the girls' behavior was the parents' reactions:
As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending...
What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society’s march toward eroticized adolescence — either willingly or through abject surrender. And if parents give up, what can a school do? A teacher at the middle school later told me she had stopped chaperoning dances because she was put off by the boy-girl pelvic thrusting and had no way to stop it — the children wouldn’t listen to her and she had no authority to send anyone home. She guessed that if the school had tried to ban the sexy talent-show routines, parents would have been the first to complain, having shelled out for costumes and private dance lessons for their Little Miss Sunshines.
I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.
My oldest daughter performed in a community youth association drill team when she was in first and second grade. The first year, they performed the sorts of routines I expected from 7-, 8-, and 9-year-olds: lots of stepping this way and that, moving arms in half circles, shaking little pom pons.
But the second year, the coach wanted the squad to be more competitive, and so she had a dance studio create a new, more "mature" routine, which included shimmying their non-existent breasts. I was appalled, particularly when the squad went to a state competition (yes, I let her stay in that long) and I saw that our squad's routine was tame by comparison with the vamping, strutting, and slinking around exhibited by other elementary school girls. That competition was the end of drill team for us, and I'm still ambivalent about allowing the youngest daughter into dance classes.
I like to encourage my daughters to be proud of themselves and their accomplishments, but I don't think teaching them that simulating sex for a talent show is the way to be proud of themselves.
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