This past weekend I made my usual weekly run to the local library, where we are very grateful there are plenty of new and exciting books on the shelves. The town in Maine where our farm is located has a tiny, century old, stone structure that only seems to house dusty tomes from the 1950's. I don't think they have bought a new book in 20 years, so it seems that I will have to either make updating the library my new volunteer project, or I will have to travel 30 minutes to the big city and peruse the thousands of new volumes donated by author Steven King.
One of my finds this past trip was Girls Gone Mild, Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good. While I thought it was well researched and well written, I think the author went a bit over the top in her assessment of how skanky our culture has become. Either that or having no TV, no newspaper, and no child in the public school system has insulated me from the general culture.
Wendy Shalit covers the gamut from preschoolers playing with Bratz dolls and wearing clothes fit for a lady of the evening, to the college scene of drunken hook-ups replacing old-fashioned dating. While I know that many parents let their children dress in hooker clothes and many sorority chicks do bounce from one sleepover to another, there are alternatives for the rest of us. We don't have to buy clothes at stores that cater to that element, we don't have to send our children to colleges that have dual gender dorms and unisex bathrooms. We can purchase clothes at thrift stores (my favorite) and children's consignment stores (they have high end stuff cheap), from catalogues like Lands End and Hanna Anderson, and on ebay. We can send our teens to colleges that strive to retain some semblance of excellence in the academic and social realms, and we can refuse to donate money to an alma mater that has gone completely over the edge. We must vote with our feet and our pocketbooks, otherwise what Mrs. Shalit describes might come to pass for the majority of our youth.
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Having lived in both New England and California, I think that regional differences come into play here. New Englanders tend to be a bit more "buttoned-up". I think it's a combo of the weather and the last lingering remnants of Puritanism.
It's funny that you mention Girls Gone Mild since that's the book I'm reading now.
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