Hoping That The Children Aren't Our Future

Don't trust anyone under 30! An entire generation of Disney-ized "princesses" & macho male consumers in training are rising up beneath us, & it's not going to be a pretty princess deal when you're counting on these spoiled rug rats to take care of you in your dotage.

Since television was deregulated in the early 1980s, marketing strategies have taken over all aspects of kids' lives. From bedsheets to clothes and shoes to the lunch box they carry -- they're all linked to media, to popular culture. The message is, this is what's desirable, this is what you should be. And look at what they were offered: For boys, there was GI Joe, He-Man, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For girls, there was My Little Pony, Care Bears, Disney's princesses. Gender roles were very much part of that marketing. There was a whole new escalation in gender division when children began to become a market. [...] 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."

Says one Diane E. Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston, & the co-author, with Jean Kilbourne, of "So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids." Ah. Yet another left-wing feminist academic complaining about the traditional sex roles that have made our families & nation great!