Paradigm Shift: A Libertarian Approach to Censorship? Not So Much.

Posted by Greg Allen on 04.10.2007

Everywhere you look today girls are getting older, younger. Are we raising an entire generation of whores? Greg Allen weighs in with another edition of Paradigm Shift.

Last week Joshua White wrote a column about the issue of eating disorders in this country. (If you didn't catch it, here it is). Briefly, he feels that eating disorders in this country (the too-thin variety) are a result of hypersexualized media. There's lots of fun psychology experiments to back this up. My personal favorite is the one where women who are made to read Cosmo eat, on average, one less pretzel than the women forced to read Time. Men, on the other hand, will average three more pretzels after reading Men's Fitness. Anyway, Joshua plugged my column last week (which just so happens to be my only criteria for liking a guy) but his solution to eating disorders in America is downright scary. As he puts it, "The solution is censorship."

Censorship is a great solution... if you're the one censoring. For everybody else though, especially the most creative members of society, censorship takes the best parts of the human experience and nips them in the bud. Now, nobody here is saying that anorexia is a good thing in adolescent girls, but in the end, censorship advocates are inevitably saying that the government shouldn't trust you to choose for yourself. Sound like something the freedom-worshiping libertarians would say? Me neither.

To me, it seems far more likely that this is just one more instance of a bunch of moral crusaders focusing on things they don't like first and thinking of reasons why it's wrong second.

To be fair though, the anorexia issue is the strongest part of the argument. It's not, however, the most hot button issue today. Thanks to a slew of magazine articles, including a Newsweek cover story last February, the new focus is on whether or not girls are dressing too promiscuously, and that's the issue I'd like to focus on in this article. Newsweek posed the question, "Are we raising a generation of 'prosti-tots'" If you're not familiar with the term, UrbanDictionary.com defines a "prosti-tot" as a "prepubescent girl who already dresses like a whore."

I have an answer. It's no. Take a look at this beauty of a quote—straight out of the Newsweek story.

If the unheard of actions of today's youth are allowed to continue, then we are doomed.
-Five thousand year old Sumerian tablet

As the tablet illustrates, these are the kind of arguments parents have been making since the dawn of time. It's the same old story: teenagers struggle to express themselves as individuals and distance themselves from their parents; parents struggle to keep kids from leaving the nest too early.

I suppose there is one difference with the modern situation. Unlike those hut-dwelling, rock-carving Sumerians, modern man takes opinion polls. According to Newsweek's "77% of Americans believe that Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan have too much influence on young girls."

Before you rush to agree with such a story, stop to think about morality in this country. Is it really in a sorrier state than ever before? Have people said that it's in a sorrier state than ever before, before? Sure, there are some things that are definitely different now from before: Abercrombie and Fitch, adopting the business philosophy, "Kids are getting older, younger" (KAGOY) has released a line of thong underwear for girls aged ten to sixteen. That's certainly new, but is the entire country really on the road to ruin because of A&F? Because of ten year olds in thongs that say "wink wink"?

The answer is still no. The self-appointed moral police often state that sexual perversion was the cause of the downfall of Rome, but even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia article will tell you Rome was just as oversexualized during its rise as during its fall.

Likewise, the sexualization of young girls can hardly be termed a new phenomenon considering that in earlier times ages ten through sixteen often included marriage and childbirth—and one more thing: arguments against kids wearing thongs are remarkably similar to the arguments against women wearing pants back when that was unacceptable. Here's a question: if what people wear somehow affects society as a whole, why aren't the hunter-gatherer societies that live in the nude from birth to death falling apart at the seams? Why aren't they suffering from rampant outbreaks of anorexia?

Look, I'm not advocating teen pregnancy, but isn't it obvious that right now isn't so different from any other period in time? Did the free love movement destroy society? How about Marilyn Monroe posing naked for Playboy? Elvis gyrating his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show? Hell, no! Life went on, and in the meantime, the generation happily absorbing all that immoral media invented computers, MRIs, and cell phones. Yet, for whatever reason, that same generation has turned into its parents and become appalled at the latest editions of teenage vice.

So let's address this latest moral frenzy – the one about how America's daughters are being raised to whore themselves out – head on. Apparently, Britney, Paris, and Lindsay are the real terrorists. They go out to party pantyless (always pantyless) and proceed to drink, smoke, and snort coke, all the while being photographed for a media that virtually guarantees teens will emulate them. I wonder how the 77 percent of America terrified of these three pop icons reconciles that terror with the fact that girls today are better off in virtually every measurable category. If girls mimic these users of the rehab revolving door, then why are teen drug and alcohol use both down? Similarly, if they are an unstoppable force advocating sexual promiscuity, why is teen pregnancy at its lowest level in thirty years? Those numbers don't even take into account population growth, which makes them all the more impressive.

Women currently make up 56 percent of college enrollees and are excelling in sports, academics, and the job market. It's unlikely Paris Hilton can take credit for these achievements, but people should probably stop saying she's the Anti-Christ. There's one more statistic that is perhaps the most telling: according to the Justice Department, in the past twelve years alone, sexual assualt, which dressing promiscuously is supposed to encourage, (blame the victim, anyone?) has plummeted a full 78 percent. Despite all the new "immoral" things girls are doing, things for them are obviously going very right.

All that, however, only addresses the layperson arguments against early sexualization of girls. The American Psychological Association has produced its own report on the subject detailing its own reasons for concern. The results of their survey of available research are as follows: young girls are sexually objectified by themselves and by their peers. This objectification has serious negative consequences including decreased cognitive performance, increased rates of anorexia and "an increase in sexism; fewer girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, increased rates of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and an increased demand for child pornography."

The first claim refers to an experiment in which college girls were asked to put on either a sweater or a bikini before taking a math test in an isolated room. The results showed those in bikinis performed significantly worse than those in sweaters. The experiment is held up as proof that "thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity." The experiment sounds damning, but there are a whole host of other possible explanations for the results. It could simply be that women were extremely confused and uncomfortable about having to wear a swimsuit.

Still, even if the experiment does show what the researchers claim, it's not an appropriate analogy to daily life. Women who choose to dress in a sexualized manner select clothing they believe will present them as most attractive, maximizing confidence. The swimsuit in the experiment was chosen by random strangers and could very well have led to the decreased test results only because they were unhappy with it. Maybe if they were allowed to pick their favorite swim wear, they would perform better than they would wearing their favorite sweater. Who knows? As for right now, the results aren't anywhere near conclusive. What is needed is correlated data that the more "sexually objectified" (however that is properly defined) a person is, the worse they perform academically. As it stands, however, I have a hard time believing women who wear thongs immediately get dumber.

Regarding anorexia, Lindsay Lohan (since gaining back some weight) is practically the teen idol of the "Real women have curves" movement, which seeks to address unhealthy image portrayals in the media. Celebrities are constantly criticized for being too thin. As this campaign spreads throughout the mediums of distribution, the cause—which the media may not be, many cases of anorexia seem to be related to neurological issues—may very well become the solution. Forcing the curves movement into dominance via censorship may rob the movement of its public credibility as the time it needs that most.

The last series of accusations made by the APA exist in a data and statistics vacuum. All assertions come without a shred of science to back them up and are rather improbable given that all listed negative consequences have been going down for the past few decades, the same time early sexualization of women seems to be going up. It is this part of the report that comes dangerously close to politicizing science. Whether or not the APA's findings clash with the moral majority should never be an issue. Unfortunately, it seems this report was focused first on a conclusion and second on the evidence.

So let's bring the discussion full circle. Is current sexual morality in America totally without precedent? It's no more unprecedented than it was fifty years or even five thousand years ago. Is society doomed to collapse under the weight of its own sin? Nope, because what is termed sin is really just girls choosing clothing the way they always have, by trying to find acceptance within a social group. Lastly, are girls being sexualized too early to their own detriment? Possibly, but the circumstantial evidence could just as easily point in the opposite direction.

I have this dream of a society where youths don't grow up to become all the parts of their parents they despised when they were young. The first step is for parents to stop taking things they just don't like and artificially engineering reasons against them. Rationality comes first. That, by the way, is what it means to be Libertarian.