Selling sexy to girls

To me, this is objectification of both boys and girls -- allowing little human beings to be treated as if they were objects. Girls learn to judge boys by how well they meet that objective definition of mindless, unfeeling machoism. And boys learn to judge girls by how sexy they are. This is why we may be seeing a generation in which relationships are often played out as interactions between caricatures of sexual stereotypes, why you can have friends with benefits and "hooking up."

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Do you think there's a connection here with child sex abuse?

There could be -- we need to learn more about this. The fact that women more and more are supposed to look like girls and that girls are supposed to look like women means there's a blurring of boundaries between what is a child and what is a grown-up. These ambiguous sexual connections are going to make it harder and harder for men who have difficulty drawing those boundaries to make distinctions too.

It's also going to make little girls think that men of all ages thinking you're cute -- cute and a little sexy -- is perfectly appropriate. . . . The idea of having a pretty body at 7 -- what does that mean? The body held up to them is not the average body of an 8-year-old. That concerns me.

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What's a parent to do? If our little girls, our tweens, our young teens think this is normal (which it is) and want them, what's the best way to deal with that?

First, you have to understand the nature of the problem and see how the pieces fit together.

I tend to think of kids as developing two boxes in their head: There's the pop culture box -- that's all the messages they're getting about what are the norms out there in the world, how they should look, what they should care about, what it means to be a girl or a boy, attitudes about violence, sex and consumption.

And then there's the family/society box: From what's in this box, they learn what it means to be caring, connected, contributing members of society. Right now, the boxes are pretty much disconnected.

The pop culture box is getting bigger and bigger, and the home and family box is getting crowded out. Adults don't try to connect to the popular culture except to get upset at it, punish their kids for spending time in it, and pretend it's not there. It's just so hard for them to think what to do. The result is that kids are seeing their parents as stupid, out of touch and obstructionist at an earlier and earlier age and considering them irrelevant.