Love Your Thighs, Save a Prostitot!
In Saturday's New York Times, Judith Warner wins the prize ($) for weirdest take on the American Psychological Association's toddlers-in-thongs report:
Our girls see right through all our righteousness. And they hear the hypocrisy, too, when we dish out all kinds of pabulum about a "positive body image," then go on to trash our own thighs.
Maybe it's time to take a break from bashing the media and start to take a long, hard look instead at the issue of mothers' sexuality, which is, apparently, after a long and well-documented dormancy, enjoying a kind of rebirth—thanks, it is said, to things like pole dancing classes and sports club stripteases. These new evening antics of the erstwhile book club set are supposed to be fabulous because they give sexless moms a new kind of erotic identity. But what a disaster they really are: an admission that we've failed utterly, as adult women, to figure out what it means to look and feel sexy with dignity.
Got that? Small girls are baring more skin because they hate their bodies. They hate their bodies because they sense that adult women, as a unit, are insecure. We know that all women are insecure, because a lot of them hate their thighs, and some of them are learning to pole dance. The solution? Love yourself!
This is what happens when your worldview is entirely framed by random New York Times trend stories.