As the kids get older, I’m actually able to have a few snippets of adult conversation at parties, instead of constantly patrolling the kids to make sure that they aren’t falling down stairs or knocking over glass figurines. The cocktail chatter:
1. Justin Timberlake’s Special Treat In a Box. And how NBC put the uncensored version on YouTube, when it couldn’t make it past the censors on TV.
2. Who watched Saddam get hung on You Tube? Not me.
3. James Brown. My dad recalled being at a wedding for a well-known political philosopher who played “I Feel Good” when the rabbi told him to kiss the bride and then the newly married couple danced down the aisle together. Gotta love Hot Tub.
4. My mom whispered to me, “thank God, you have boys.” When Steve came back from his high school reunion this fall, he was rather shocked to see the high school cheerleaders doing a pole dance for the crowd. I guess he shouldn’t have been so shocked, because even middle school girls are bumping and grinding. Nice quote:
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.
Apt. 11d 
Pole dancing? Wonderful. And here I thought I’d have to help my girls face the patriarchy; turns out it’s also other little girls.
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Tell your mom before she gets too smug about boys that there is a kid in Georgia who has been sentenced to ten years for, when 17, getting a Lewinsky from a fifteen-year-old girl. Consensual. http://volokh.com/posts/1166468931.shtml
And their big problem is that it was at a party and somebody videotaped it.
But yes, girls are vulnerable too. There are, I think, a number of sites where people, mostly young men, post photos of the women who’ve been naked in their presence, and presumably had sex with. The one I am aware of is […deleted…]
A lot of these photos have the look of having been shot in dorm rooms, many of the young women look drunk and not quite sure this photo is a good idea. My guess is, it’s not! and before I send my girl off to college I will likely make sure she has seen this site or one like it, and will say something like, ‘Sweetie, if you go to a party and it somehow seems like a good idea to all around you to get naked, and there are cameras, maybe it is a good idea to put your shirt on and go home. And if you don’t, maybe in ten years you have worked like crazy and you are up before the partnership committee at the accounting firm of your dreams, and someone will find these photos on the Internet – because they WILL be on the Internet – and your hopes are dashed.’
And then I will tell her the sad story of Dr Laura (Schlesinger, not McKenna) whose naked photos from twenty years ago made her a national laughingstock when they went on the Internet.
Nothing is forgotten anymore. Both our boys and our girls had best be aware that anything they do, if can hurt them, very well may.
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you should also advise them to never have a blog.
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Age Compession #4358
From Apt. 11D, I read Lawrence Downes’ essay in the New York Times, Middle School Girls Gone WildWhat surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society’s march toward eroticized
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This post kind of triggered me to wax on, on risk, at Half Changed World – if you’re interested it’s at http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/09/tbr_the_great_r.html#comment-27323602
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