Good news, moms and dads! Your teenage daughters are using their budding entrepreneurial skills to become … prostitutes. That’s what Canadian film maker Sharlene Azam alleges in a new documentary and companion book called Oral Sex Is The New Goodnight Kiss.
According to the website:
…Attractive, white, high school girls – 13, 14 and 15 years old – are having sex with up to 7 men a night, several times a week, so they can go shopping. Other girls are selling their virginity for $1000. These are not street prostitutes. “They are the prettiest girls from the most successful families,” explains one expert…
The voices of the girls are cold enough to chill the hearts of the most jaded parent:
“Five minutes and I got $100,” one girl said. “If I’m going to sleep with them, anyway, because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”
“I’d begun having threesomes at a really young age. I did it for attention or because that guy has a connection to get you something that you want — drugs, clothes, whatever.”
Azam believes the phenomenon is new and places the blame squarely on the usual suspects.
The Internet:
Fifteen years ago, if a girl wanted to learn more about horses, she would go to the library and find pictures of horses in meadows. Today, if you type “horse” and “girl” in Google, the first hit is: “American girl licks hung horse dick”.
Celebrity Culture:
…Anyone who has ever stood in a supermarket checkout line knows that, in addition to conforming to an extremely narrow definition of beauty … today’s female pop icons are sex objects to be alternately exalted, ogled, emulated, critiqued, condemned, pitied, and recycled … ad nauseum…
With role models like these, immersed in a culture where sexuality is tied to celebrity status and money, girls are conditioned to feel empowered whenever they are the sexual center of attention.
Television:
Your daughter who may not yet have kissed a boy has probably seen a threesome, girl on girl kissing … and alcohol and drug use on Gossip Girl where there are no consequences and no interference…
But in reality, while the medium may be new, the message is as old as time. Women exist for the use and gratification of men, and have no worth of their own. These supposedly new sexual phenomena are the direct result of ancient beliefs: men are superior to women, women (their property and their bodies) are owned by men, the primary purpose of women is the sexual satisfaction of men.
These teenage Canadian prostitutes, for that is what they are, are the direct lineal descendants of royal mistresses, courtesans, and denizens of the “casting couch.” They sleep their way to what they want, because it is the easiest, quickest way to get what they want. Men are willing to pay for sex and the girls believe that they are exploiting that willingness.
These girls don’t realize that they are the ones being exploited. They sell themselves too cheaply, willing to trade their bodies for trinkets or a bit of discretionary income. This is not about sex, though sex is the medium of exchange. It’s about the dignity and worth of women.
Though they would no doubt balk at the comparison, these girls are no different than their sisters of 500 or 2,000 or 5,000 years ago. They are treated as, and believe themselves to be, nothing more than commodities. They accept that anything valuable in life can be gained only by pleasing men. They assume that women are not entitled to satisfaction during sex; that’s the province of men and women must be paid for their participation.
The solution to this problem is not keeping girls away from the Internet, TV and the celebrity culture. The solution is imbuing girls AND boys, women AND men, with the principle that women are independent moral beings, worthy of respect in their own right, and not objects of amusement for men. The solution is inculcating our daughters with the self confidence to achieve their desires through their own abilities, the self respect to scorn the advances of those who wish only to exploit them, and the sense of self worth that would prevent them from trading so much for so very little.
