Letters to the Editor
-
21 going on 41
What I think is that this alcoholic, drug-using party girl of 21 looks more like 41 (a good 5 years older than Marilyn), making your point about only the young being considered sexy kind of moot.
If young girls are going to take any kind of cue from the Lohans of the world, I hope it's that drinking and drugging puts about 20 years on their faces.
-
exactly
Not to mention, she has a shitload of sun damage. I don't understand having access to the best skin care possible and still looking like an old leather glove.
I wasn't innocent by any means at the age of 21, but in photos I still looked like a 16-year-old (as MANY girls of 21 do). She has no excuse.
-
debauched
you could make a pretty convincing case, just from the facts of history, that as a society becomes more affluent, it becomes more debauched. The increasing social fetish making younger and younger women into sex-symbols is a relatively minor, but telling, example of the ways affluent societies become more and more extreme in the pursuit of pleasure.
It's not the only time in history very young women have been objectified in this way...in some sense, they probably have always been treated this way. But in our time, this tendency does seem more and more pronounced.
And I'm no prude, hardly. But it is interesting...and more than a little creepy, that if you drill down into various human societies that controlled great wealth every last one rotted from within.
It's a stretch, but I'd propose that if you give alpha males enough wealthy, they simply start corrupting everything they can lay hands on, just because they can. By the way, these males are very useful in any society, but given free reign, as they have been given lately, they're like a dog that won't stop peeing in the house...and if you think money and alpha males are not at the root of a lot of what ails us, you haven't been paying attention.
-
again, about the videos...
1. People read Salon at work.
2. People have slow internet connections.
3. People are deaf/hard-of-hearing and CAN'T UNDERSTAND A VIDEO WITHOUT CLOSED CAPTIONING.
I presume that you aren't just making this up as you go and that you wrote it out before getting in front of the WebCam. Really, would it be so hard to copy and paste what you wrote onto Broadsheet?
-
_Please_ provide a transcript along with the videos...
Some of us can read a lot faster than we can wade through a video. And we get to re-read and mull over the points made. Thanks!
-
The answer may lie in the mainstreaming of porn.
Tracy, I do not agree that the notion of young women being sex objects, coupled with the notion of older women not being considered sexy, is either new or necessarily valid. Young women (we'll say over 18) have always been objects of desire in popular culture. Just look at the rebel teen movies of the 1940s to 1950s (e.g., "Dragstrip Girl" or "High School Confidential") or the beach blanket movies of the 1950's-1960's (often starring Annette Funicello, speaking of the Mickey Mouse Club). Part of the appeal of those movies was seeing bad girls in tight sweaters, or wholesome girls in swimsuits, or vice versa.
On the other hand, attractive older women are still valued. TV shows like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" from the 1970's, through "Sex in the City" and "Desperate Housewives," still celebrate sexy women in their 30's and 40's. And wasn't everybody yakking about how hot Helen Mirren looked at last year's Oscars?
The difference might be that today, pornography seems to be everywhere. When I was a boy in the 1970's, the big coup d'etat was grabbing a peek at your dad's Playboy. Now, as we all know, anyone can surf the web and see naked women of all ages doing anything you can imagine, and stuff you never thought of. It's 24-7 porn if you want it.
So now we have teenage girls wearing "Porn Star" t-shirts. When I took my 15 year-old niece to the mall, she wanted to shop in a store called "Wet Seal." Let's just say that if she was my kid, I'd probably have shipped her off to a nunnery before letting her wear what I think it's fair to call slut-wear. Stores like "American Apparel" may as well be called "Jail Bait Fashions," both for what they sell and the large ads they plaster on their windows.
Why do young women flash their naked bodies for "Girls Gone Wild" videos or on YouTube or in any number of amateur porn sites without, it seems, any concern that everyone from their classmates to their grandparents might see them? I don't understand that. Video of Paris Hilton giving oral sex to her boyfriend can be watched by the entire planet, and parents bring their young daughters to shopping malls so they can squeal in delight when Paris shows up to hawk her latest product. Even squeaky clean Hannah Montana plays up the sex angle.
Compared to amateur videos of young women exposing themselves, what is Lindsey Lohan mimicking Marilyn Monroe? Aside from the gimmick angle, Lindsey ain't showing anyone something they can't see any time they want.
In the end, it's not that young women are suddenly more attractive than older women, but that the opportunity to see young women in sexual scenarios is far more widespread and easy to come by.
Whether or not this is another sign of the fall of Rome, Part II, I'll leave for others to ponder.
-
The past is the past
I think that the facts that BS was once on the Mickey Mouse Club, and that LL was once in Disney movies is not the same as getting our sex symbols from those shows. They got their starts there, but that was years ago in each of their cases. Kids do grow up, and now they're both women. Britney Spears is 26, for cryin' out loud.
I think that the statement that we're getting our sex symbols from those places is a comment of automatic negativity, said without reflection.
21 is young, but remember than in previous generations, a 21 year-old quite often was married with children, and that was NORMAL.