Guest Columnist
[TS] Hot Tots, and Moms Hot to Trot
By JUDITH WARNER
...I think it’s fair, even necessary, to wonder: how can we expect our daughters to navigate the cultural rapids of becoming sexual beings when we ourselves are flying blind? How can we teach them to inhabit their bodies with grace and pleasure if we spend our own lives locked in hateful battles of control, mastery and self-improvement?
We all tend to talk a good game now on things like body image and sexual empowerment. We buy the American Girl body book, “The Care and Keeping of You,” promote a “healthy” diet and exercise, and wax rhapsodic about team sports. But do we practice what we preach?
Not when we walk around the house sucking in our stomachs in front of the mirrors. Not when we obsessively regulate the contents of our refrigerators in the name of “purity.” (Did you know that there’s a clinical word for the “fixation on righteous eating”? It’s called “orthorexia.”) Our girls see right through all our righteousness. And they hear the hypocrisy, too, when we dish out all kinds of pabulum about a “positive body image,” then go on to trash our own thighs.
That, at least, is what I’ve been told by Rosalind Wiseman, author of the Queen Bee books, who spends much of her time touring the country, lecturing parents and listening to what girls have to say.
The tweens she meets beg her to let their moms know they see through them. They snigger, too — in communities where plastic surgery is the norm — at “augmented” moms who strut their stuff in spaghetti straps and spandex. A group of 12-year-olds Wiseman recently met told her: “Our mothers are coming to school thinking they’re 18 years old. We feel bad for these women. It’s embarrassing.”
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