Sexualization of Youth essay

The Sexualization of America’s youth.

Purpose
At the end of my speech, the audience will be aware of how we are making children more sexualized at younger ages.

Introduction
It’s a warm day in late spring and you’ve decided to visit the county fair with some friends.  You hear an announcement about a dancing show that’s about to start and you convince your friends to go watch.  You find and seat and watch as a group of four year olds prance out onto the stage in provocative clothing and start dancing pole dances reserved, or so you thought, for strip joints. You feel this is an isolated event and walk away.  Later on you take your sister and her young daughter shopping.  You notice thongs for sale for seven year olds, as well as underwear that says, “Sweet Cherry” on the front.  There are makeup kits and at Toys R Us, “where ads for the scantily clad Bratz Babyz dolls, with their bottles and their painted toenails, boast that these "Babyz already know how to flaunt it, and they're keepin' it real in the crib!"” (www.commondreams.org/views06/0…)  How do you feel about this?  

…Back in the prudish days…
Back in the 50’s there were things that kids were “just not old enough” to understand, and even if they learned it in junior high, chances are they weren’t going to do anything until they were seniors in high school.  Now days, many girls lose their virginity at the age of thirteen, some even getting pregnant.  Even the youngest of girls knows how to do a pelvic thrust and booty shake, whether they know what it signifies.
So how is this an ethical issue?  Perhaps because we are responsible for the education of the youth.  We are the role models that one day they will become.  If they have role models like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, how should we expect our children to grow up?  Young girls idolize movie stars and want to be like them.  If their idol is doing every guy she can, you might expect  your child to want to do the same because it's popular.  

Online and the connection to pornography...
Going online, I found many sites that discuss this topic.  One I found commented "Children WILL mimic adult behavior, and to some degree at a certain age may believe they want that attention and action. Adults need to act like adults and maintain the boundaries.
posted by edgeways at 1:20 PM on March 14"  (ask.metafilter.com/34329/Child…).  Many people linked sites proving that child sexuality is a growing problem, especially online, such as a blog called "Cute Cosplay Angels" which portrayed either minors or young women that looked young in very sexual positions and clothing.  
Many young girls use sites such as myspace.com to get sexual attention resulting in inappropriate meetings between the minor and adult.  They have the show "To Catch a Predator" to catch those who would meet with a minor for sexual reasons, but it doesn't eliminate the sexuality that we put on our children.  When they wear provocative clothing, what are we supposed to expect a pedophile to feel?  We're just baiting them.  
Another site I read, written by Rosa Brooks, said, "In a two-part series on pedophilia, the newspaper reported that many pedophiles now use Internet support groups to swap how-to tips on getting jobs as camp counselors and teachers. Increasingly, the Times said, "pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws. They portray themselves as battling for children's rights to engage in sex with adults…."  
It was only when I hauled the girls off to the local shopping mall that my paranoid fears were replaced by all-too-rational anxieties. First, we darted into Abercrombie & Fitch, joining a gaggle of preteens checking out the T-shirts. Perhaps a slinky pink number that coyly declared "The Rumors Are True"? Or maybe the masculine gray one emblazoned with "Something About You Attracts Me — I Wish I Could Put My Finger On It"?
Well, no thanks. We headed toward Limited Too, where we found thong-like underwear sized for 7-year-old girls. My 4-year-old was entranced: "Mommy, those underpants have no walls!"
We soldiered on, through Old Navy (where the toddler section carries clothes that make 2-year-olds look like Britney Spears), through Toys R Us (where ads for the scantily clad Bratz Babyz dolls, with their bottles and their painted toenails, boast that these "Babyz already know how to flaunt it, and they're keepin' it real in the crib!"), and past the Disney Store (where little girls can covet seashell bikinis like those worn by the Little Mermaid and glittery halter tops like those worn by Princess Jasmine in the surprisingly broad-minded sultanate of Agrabah).
By the time we made it to CVS Pharmacy, I thought we were out of the woods. Wrong. Those bare-midriffed Disney princesses are everywhere — even, it turns out, on diapers sized for people weighing 18 to 34 pounds.
In our hyper-commercialized consumerist society, there's virtually no escaping the relentless sexualization of younger and younger children. My 26-month-old daughter didn't emerge from the womb clamoring for a seashell bikini like Princess Ariel's — but now that she's savvy enough to notice who's prancing around on her pull-ups, she wants in on the bikini thing. And my 4-year-old wasn't born demanding lip gloss and nail polish, but when a little girl at nursery school showed up with her Hello Kitty makeup kit, she was hooked.
In a culture in which the sexualization of childhood is big business — mainstream mega-corporations such as Disney earn billions by marketing sexy products to children too young to understand their significance — is it any wonder that pedophiles feel emboldened to claim that they shouldn't be ostracized for wanting sex with children? On an Internet bulletin board, one self-avowed "girl lover" offered a critique of this week's New York Times series on pedophilia: "They fail, of course, to mention the hypocrisy of Hollywood selling little girls to millions of people in a highly sexualized way." I hate to say it, but the pedophiles have a point here.
There are plenty of good reasons to worry about children and sex. But if we want to get to the heart of the problem, we should obsess a little less about whether the neighbor down the block is a dangerous pedophile — and we should worry a whole lot more about good old-fashioned American capitalism, which is busy serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter."
She makes a very good point that many discuss in depth online.  Who can we blame for this?  Is it corporate America’s fault for putting this kind of stuff on the market?  Is it the parent’s fault for buying it?  Many like to blame Hollywood, because Hollywood is an unethical, immoral piece of America full of debauchery, drugs, sex, and money.  It’s really everyone.  They don’t say it takes a village to raise a child for nothing.  Everything influences children.
On the other side of the argument, this person has this to say:

“And some will say, and what do you expect from a culture that so sexualizes youth?  Actually,  humanity has been sexualizing its youth for thousands of years; it's only in modern times that we've placed an absolute prohibition on acting on it.  As I recall, teens getting married was the norm in the Renaissance; the ancient Greeks had institutionalized a form of pederasty-for-education trade.
I bring this up not to justify having sex with kids (duh), but to show that it is quite obviously not a psychiatric disorder.  It is a crime that you choose to commit.
There is too much emotion around sexual predators, and it confuses the issues.  For example, why do we register them?  We don't register serial killers, con artists, unabombers, etc.  The argument, "well, wouldn't you want to know if a sex offender was living in your neighborhood?" isn't valid: I assume everyone is a sex offender. Seriously.  Especially around my kids.  And wouldn't you want to know the Zodiac killer moved in?”
He further states:  “Don't misinterpret my support of civil liberties as permissiveness; if you're really worried that a sex offender will offend again, make his criminal sentence longer, harsher. If society wants  to make pedophilia a capital offense, fine.  But for the love of God, don't turn sex offenders over to the psychiatrists, the two have nothing to do with each other.  You may as well send them to the sociologists, they have about as much to do with them.
This is an extremely bad law, and by bad I mean bad for everyone except the bad guys.  It sets up the argument that certain "behaviors" are so a part of one's identity that they cannot be altered or prevented, and therefore culpability is reduced while dangerousness is magnified.  It allows the government yet another avenue to lock people up without crime.  And worst of all, the penultimate decision about who should be locked up for society's benefit is made by the absolute worst group to make this decision: psychiatrists.  Psychiatry becomes a tool of the state.”
Excuses, excuses…
Pedophiles and sex offenders use the fashion industry as an excuse, something they can blame.  One thing to remember, though, is that sexual assault/rape of a child is not as common as the media would like you to believe, nor is it done mostly by strangers.  
• 93% of juvenile sexual assault victims knew their attacker; 34.2% were family members and 58.7% acquaintances. Only 7% of the perpetrators were strangers to the victim, according to the 2000 Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. This study is available at the Bureau of Justice Statistics website.
So this is just something to think about.  How ethical are we being raising our children in the manner that most parents do?  Buying them all the latest fashions that happen to make them look provocative and appealing.  Why do we do it?  Some say it’s because women have no place in society anymore except as a symbol of sex.  There are no more jobs that only women can do except breed.  Others say it’s all a conspiracy.

Conclusion
We live in a society full of different cultures and ideas, with so many opinions that we argue over whose ethics are better, and while we argue, our children watch and learn.  Everything we do, they try to mimic and sometimes they succeed more than we would like them to, only we don’t notice that until it’s too late.