And who are you to delegitimise the sexual expression of the Yiipie-Kai-Yayers of this world?
I don’t know, ask the girl who bought and chose to wear the shirt.
I agree with Evil Captor to a pretty good extent about the rebellion against messages.
I’ll also point out that teenage girls are trying to be fashionable to other teenage girls and attractive/ sexy to teenage boys their age or slightly older. At that age those two objectives probably took up 75-90% of my brainpower. To a very great degree, people over say 22 don’t even exist in their world. A 15 year old girl doesn’t dress considering whether she will make a 30 year old man slobber or a 45 year old feminist roll over in her grave.
I’m not making the connection between young girls dressing like hookers and acquiring crushing power. Young girls are still vulnerable.
Anyway, it’s not about making a political statement. It’s about peer pressure and fashion. That’s all it is. It’s not gynocentric or liberating or anything else. It’s wearing what you have to wear to be “in”. Any liberation or power is illusory, manufactured by the advertising industry to sell overpriced clothes.
Fair enough; however, it is still not obvious how it is objectifying the girl. Indeed, it is not obvious what the hell objectifying means in the first place! As far as I’ve been able to discern, “objectification” is non-word on par with “free markets” and “compassionate conservatism.”
I think it’s more accurate to say that we have to get through some real mumbo-jumbo post-modernist speak to get anything out of it at all. Neither tight t-shirts nor porn turn women into inanimate objects any more than normal sexual desire does. A hottie in pleated trousers is no less a sex object than one in painted-on jeans.
Is that even what objectify means? No, according to a professor of feminist theory I once new; it also meant putting an objective value on someone, in the same sense that some Marxists speak of objectifying labor. In that sense, sex is objectified via prostitution, for example, but that is not obviously bad. Moreover, an underage girl in a tight t-shirt is not putting a price on sexuality.
In light of what little the OP said on the controversy, perhaps this trend is actually a good thing: the very notion that women can be arbitrarily made into objects is no less insulting than the notion that blacks can be arbitrarily made into chattel. The women I know cannot be turned into objects, and to suggest that they can only takes away the culpability from those who treat them as such.
I’m sure we’ve seen the ever-so-cute bumpersticker about feminism being the belief that women aren’t doormats; however, neither is feminism believing that women are porcelain dolls: gender feminism is the chauvinist pig’s dream come true.
As a 36 year-old man, I can say that does not go through my mind. If a 16 year old is good looking, I’ll notice that no matter what. If she’s wearing a shirt about riding cowboys, I’ll think, “Cool.” It’s a joke, just like when a woman says “a hard man is good to find,” it’s a joke, but it doesn’t mean she’s going to fuck any guy w/ a boner.
It’d be nice if we could fully sever our ligering psychosis that informed the Victorian mass hysteria regarding sexuality in America.
Pretty much, to me, yes. And, I’m not able to discuss the term with people who probably spent 4 weeks on the topic in a gender studies class.
I see a girl wearing a T-Shirt that says “rear entry” (I doubt that even exists) and I’m probably checking her out and thinking, “that’s something I’d like to stick my dick in.”
To me, that’s turning a person into a sexual object. That’s objectifying a woman. And it happens in my brain.
If I see a young girl in pleated pants and glasses at the library, I think something completely different. As quaint as this may sound, I very well might think, “I wonder what she’s reading,” or “I bet she’s interesting.” I’m not thinking, “ooo, I’d like to get her behind the stacks.”
Not that I think women need to go around covered up in Burkas. I just think that the cut and the words on some of these T-Shirts has crossed MY line, my “daughter test” if you will.
A gender studies class sounds like an excellent way to learn a junk vocabulary and become incapable of talking to normal people.
Ariel Levy is HOT. (Either that or she has one helluva stylist.)
Otherwise, I’m not getting a clear picture from the Salon article, which is just as much about what Levy doesn’t think/write/believe about teen girl culture than what she does.
I agree, though, that sexual liberation can be used as an excellent smokescreen from social liberation. Marley, Sex and the City may not be a manifesto, but it’s about as close as we come these days. And it’s basically a set of stereotypes (and coy stereotypes, despite all the cusswords) about men and relationships, as well as about women.
All I know is that when I was a teenager my mother would not have let such shirts in the house, let alone on my body. Nor would I have left the house in hiphuggers that show my underwear with a shirt that barely covers my tits. What these girls mothers are thinking, i just don’t know, but I see very young girls wearing more makeup than I do, and clothes that would make a hooker blush.
I think some previous posters have it correct:
-
the kids want to dress in a way that they think will make them look cool with no regard whatsoever to how adults - lechers, feminists, whatever - think of them
-
parents have to take a primary role in setting boundaries
I am inclined to think “same as it ever was” - I remember the freshly-buxom girl in 8th grade (what would that have made us - 12 or 13?) back in the 70’s who wore a t-shirt with the candy label “Mounds - Indescribably Delicious” on it. Oy. She thought she was cool, I couldn’t speak in her presence and our Social Studies teacher kept bumping into things…
Actually, the clothes being worn now are MUCH less skimpy than the clothes that were in style when I was in high school lo-these-many years ago. The Fashionistas (excellent film, BTW!) will probably date me to within a six-month period, but when I was in school, the gals used to wear short dresses that barely made it to mid-thigh. When they walked down the stairs, an innocent bunch of guys standing innoncently at the bottom of the stairs talking to one another and innocently glancing up to see who was coming down, could see ALL of their panties.
Women can choose to be sexual- and even objectified- without any sort of harm or degregation.
At that age, I very aware of my sexuality and it’s precise effects. Kids that are going to get in trouble are going to find trouble with or without raunchy tee shirts. Kids with a good head on their shoulder are going to be just fine, even if the occassional 30 year old hollers at them on the street.
T-shirts on Teeny-boppers I have noticed:
Goats Like to Nibble
Brand New
Maybe
Graphic: Images of Gumby’s Pony (5 points for figuring out the meaning of that one, and yes, that’s what she meant. I asked.)
Graphic: Mountainous landscape with the word ‘Grand’
Do Not Disturb
Look, but don’t Touch
I may be terribly naive here (may?), but what’s raunchy about my milkshake being better than yours?
Max, the milk is packaged in its original containers.
Here - Milkshake Lyrics
Ya lost me on that one. 
Is it possible that it is a semi-conscious rejection of feminism? The article seemed to really struggle to have it be some offshoot or variation. Maybe it’s just a rejection of it.
Pokey?
I thought it was that they were “bendy” and gave a good ride.