Age Compession #4358

From Apt. 11D, I read Lawrence Downes' essay in the New York Times, "Middle School Girls Gone Wild"

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? [snip]

But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

I don't know why Downes is surprised.

Here's a culture that  thinks a good birthday party for 6 year olds is going to a store and dressing like a prostitute.

• The Britney Effect
• Media Promoting Tween Sexuality
• Protecting Age-Appropriate Behavior
• Parents, Don't Promote or Condone Age Compression
• For Shame, Abercrombie & Fitch
• Loss of Latency from Early Puberty
• I Want to Start A Movement Against Hoochie Wear for 8 Year Olds
• Club Libby Lu: Dressing Your 6 Year Old Like A Hooker

Other writers:

• Aggravated Grandfather Writes to Macy's and Hersheys.