QandO

June 03, 2004

Sending the Wrong Message
Posted by Dale Franks

Susan Estrich addresses the issue of why such sexually suggestive clothes are becoming the fashion rage among little girls.

In my house, where the former preteen just turned 14, we call it slutwear. Girls wear wifebeater T-shirts with Pornstar logos that my daughter tells me cost a fortune. Their mothers let them out of the house dressed that way? I ask in shock. Presumably, someone buys them these clothes.

The seven men at the Wet Seal board meeting were not the only ones in Orange County addressing the limits of teenage sexuality last week. In a courthouse just a short hop away, defense lawyers were arguing that a teenage girl, who might have been a Wet Seal customer, pretended to be an actress in a kinky sex scene and willingly had sex with three boys (one of them the deputy sheriff's son), who are charged with raping and assaulting the then-16-year-old with a pool cue, a Snapple bottle and a lighted cigarette. According to the defense lawyers, this wasn't an isolated incident.

In Los Angeles, on the same day, another jury deadlocked in favor of acquitting three boys, teenagers at the time they were charged, with raping a UCLA student while on a tour of the campus. The three broke away from their high school group, knocked on the coed's door and claimed to be college football players considering transferring. One juror, explaining the result, said: It's not so far-fetched to me that today a female would go and have consensual sex with three men 10 minutes after meeting them.

If you talk to the experts, there's no reason to think that group sex is more common than it had been 10 or 20 years ago, according to Lynn Ponton, author of "The Sex Lives of Teenagers." In 1991, 54 percent of high school students responded to a national Centers for Disease Control study saying they had had sex; 10 years later, the percentage had actually dropped slightly. It's not exactly a picture of abstinence, but it could be worse.

If you don't want to be treated like a slut, don't dress like one, I tell my daughter and her friends. If you don't want to send a message about sex, don't dress your daughter in sexually provocative clothes, I tell other mothers.

I used to teach things like crime prevention and rape avoidance back in my law enforcement days. And one of the hardest things to get across to women was that the one of the factors that attracted rapists was the sexually suggestive nature of the clothing their victims wore.

This would, of course, cause an immediate uproar among at least half the women, who invariably protested that they should be able able to wear any clothing they wished without fear of being attacked by a rapist.

Well, theoretically that's true. Theoretically, I should be able to walk through South Central LA wearing a sandwich board on which racist messages are scrawled, without fear of retribution from the local residents. It is after all, my Constitutional right. I should be able to walk through Central Park at midnight, waving sheafs of $100 bills in perfect safety.

But, in the real world, the gap between "should" and "can" is a very large one. The world is the way it is is, and a foolish devotion to Utopian notions about what should be often is smashed when if faces the hard reality of what is.

If you refuse to prudently measure that gap, then you bear, for better or ill, some responsibility for what happens to you. Nobody is saying you can't wave c-notes around like a flag downtown at midnight, but let's not act all surprised if something bad happens to you as a direct result of doing so.

The plain fact of the matter is that clothing sends messages. If the message is, "I'm attractive and sexually available," then it's a bit obtuse to object when that message is received by everyone, even people whose response to it is to do some pretty frightening things.

We are doing something very odd in this country when it comes to young girls. On the one hand, we dress them, or, at the very least, allow them to dress themselves, in sexually suggestive and revealing clothes. On the other hand, we piously claim to hate child molesters who prey on them.

Every day, I'm seeing younger and younger girls wearing brief skirts, bare midriffs, sporting belly-button rings, and the whole nine yards.

There is something deeply sick about allowing pre-teen girls to display their bodies while wearing clothes that sport sexual messages. And I've seen these clothes available in the children's' section of clothing stores. We aren't talking about "Juniors" here, but actual 6-10 year old kids.

Frankly, if you are parent, and you are allowing your 12--or 17--year-old daughter to go out in public wearing her wifebeater T-shirt with "Pornstar" emblazoned across the front, then you're simply playing with fire.

First, you are a fool to assume that the sexual message it broadcasts for your daughter will not be received by some distinctly nasty people. Second, it teaches your daughter that it's perfectly benign to present herself as a sex object to the general public.

Either way, you're doing your child a gross disservice, and are negligently exposing them to dangers they shouldn't have to face.

There is a myth that rape is a crime of power projection, rather than a sexual crime. That is, at best, only partially true. Often, rape is about sex, and the fact that the rapist wants it, and he knows the woman is powerless to stop him. 13-17 year-old girls are even more powerless still.

So, if you're dressing your daughter that way, I hope she remains safe despite your stupidity and manifest parental unsuitability. But if she does, it won't be because you deserve any credit for it.

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