Let Your Daughter Choose Who She Wants to Be

When buying clothing for an unborn baby, it is almost impossible to find clothes that aren’t in pink or blue. It seems that almost from the point of conception that society attempts to assign pre-determined roles to our children, and from this point on it only gets worse. In infancy, boys are given toys that resemble weapons and power tools, and girls are given dolls that pigeon-hole them to the responsibilities of child-bearing and motherly care. These generalizations are dangerous and limit children’s true potential and possibilities from a very young age. However, it’s only in the adolescent years when the distinctions become not only presumptuous and somewhat offensive, but dangerous. Increasingly in western society, young girls are being pressured by mass-marketing of the U.S. pop culture, to become shallow, materialistic and sexually promiscuous. Never before have we so openly celebrated money, aesthetics and sex, and the apparent relationship between them in today’s culture. Since the time that Britney Spears begun selling sex disguised as chastity, to when Paris Hilton began championing the old stereotype of the financially dependent princess, we have watched the image of the equal, independent woman, recede back to the pre-women’s liberation paradigm – a pretty object, best seen and not heard. Now, with the ever-ubiquitous move of pop-stars into the world of fashion, it’s even harder to find modest or even appropriate children’s clothing in fashion boutiques. There is very little questioning going on as to whether these paradigms are appropriate. It’s obvious enough that sex sells and that is why we have these videos filled with sexual allusions and gyration. But the problem is that no one is questioning the validity of these constructed, damaging roles, and more importantly the subjugation of women and young girls to be conceptualized as little more than sex objects. This public perversion is obviously detrimental to the male perspective of women, and furthermore, it intensifies the risk of women to sexual attack. It is estimated that a woman is raped every 2 minutes in the United States today. It is time to educate our kids on why these images and ideas are good for nobody except the soulless starlets and misogynists that are getting rich from them.