http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/to-be-a-girl-in-this-culture/
Allison Pearson delivers some grim news:
A friend’s daughter recently started at a highly regarded
boarding school. When her mother asked how she was enjoying the
mixed-sex environment, the girl said quietly: “You have to give the boys
oral sex or they get cross.” Reeling with shock, the mum protested that
her darling daughter did not have to do anything of the sort. “Oh yes
you do,” replied the girl. “And you have to shave down there or the boys
don’t like it.”
The girl in question is not some brazen, street-smart
sixth-former; she is 14 years old. With a woman’s body, perhaps, but
still a child. A child who, as far as her parents were concerned, was
leading a sheltered middle-class life, not auditioning to become a
professional footballer’s WAG. Teenagers have always had secrets, places
where they go to try on their new selves, be it the pages of a
padlocked diary or the back row of the movies. But mine is the first
generation of parents that has to protect its young not just in the
world we can see and hear, but in a parallel, online universe for which
we barely know the password. And it’s really tough. Tougher even than we
know.
More:
Only last week, we heard the awful story of Chevonea
Kendall-Bryan, who fell to her death after pleading with a boy on the
pavement below to erase the recording of her performing a sex act on
him. “How much can I handle? HONESTLY. I beg you, delete that,” texted
Chevonea. She was 13. Thirty years ago, keeping your kids safe was a
doddle. The nearest your average boy got to pornography was a contraband
Playboy, which looks as quaint and charming as The Country Diary of an
Edwardian Lady next to websites such as YouPorn. Those of us who
squiggled I LOVE STEVE on the back of our hands in biro in 1975 will
struggle to comprehend that girls are now encouraged to write a boy’s
name on their naked breast, take a picture of it and text it to their
inamorato. “Not my daughter!” I hear you cry. Really, are you quite sure
about that?
According to Perry, half of all teenagers regularly see
pornography and a third of children have received a sexually explicit
text or email. If your dear son is consulting YouPorn on his mobile,
then, believe me, he will have some pretty strange ideas about the act
of physical lovemaking. I spent three minutes looking at YouPorn
yesterday and I felt like I needed at least three years in a darkened
room listening to the B minor Mass to reconstitute my soul. What the
hell would this writhing abyss look like to a 14-year-old who has never
seen a penis?
And:
In his timely new book, Raising Girls, [Steve] Biddulph
says that about five years ago (around the time that sexting and
camera-phones were taking off) psychologists began to notice a marked
and sudden plunge in girls’ mental health. The average teenage female
was “stressed and depressed in a way never seen before”. Girls were
growing up too fast, much faster than their mothers had. Our 18 is their
14, our 14 is their 10.
Mainstream media has made porn-inspired sex seem compulsory for girls
at ever younger ages. “So what?” says the liberal parent who doesn’t
think it’s cool to challenge their child’s lifestyle choices, and may
secretly envy them. Biddulph has harsh words for these hands-off mummies
and daddies: “Having your daughter as a friend – so much easier than
actually raising her,” he mocks.
Read the whole thing. I’m
very glad we homeschool, and our kids aren’t exposed to the worst of
this, but I’m under no illusions that we don’t have a difficult job
ahead of us in terms of building in resistance to porn in our children’s
character. Still, as I said the other day, I worry about marriage
prospects for my children among a generation of their peers who will
have been stunted and deformed by pornography habits.
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