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Old 07-20-2005, 12:42 PM   #1
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Default This so bugs me!

This is a VERY long article. I would have just posted the link, but you have to sign up for the Star Telegram's service. Anyway, I read this article Sunday and was so glad it was in the paper. I have been telling my husband all of this for the past few years, about how teen girls are behaving in ways that absolutley disgust me. This article is 100% true. I was talking to a friend from high school last night who has a 14 yr old step-daughter. Her mother had sent her the article and her step-daughter denied that things were like that. They are! It is actually very sad that teen girls are seeking acceptance this way. Anyway, read if you want!


Are girls the new sexual aggressors?

By LIZ STEVENS

STAR-TELEGRAM staff writer


. - At younger ages than ever before, girls are dressing provocatively, wooing boys aggressively and initiating sex. Parents complain that their sons are the victims. But, psychologists say, so are your daughters.

Girls in short skirts purposely showing off their thong underwear -- or their lack of underwear.

Girls hiking up their skirts to straddle stair banisters.

Girls catcalling after guys, groping them in hallways, sitting on their laps and even propositioning them for sex.

Sounds like "Girls Gone Wild Visits the Playboy Mansion," right?

Wrong.

It's an average day at your local high school.

And many girls are leading the wanton way.

What was once considered the province of hormone-raging teen boys -- chasing the opposite sex -- is now just as much the territory of many teen and pre-teen girls. These girls aren't just batting their mascara-laden lashes at the boys; they're dressing like hookers, talking like sailors and partaking in sexual behaviors that make the old-fashioned back-seat petting session seem as quaint as a tea party.

Jason, a recent Trimble Tech High School graduate, says girls would regularly grab his backside in the hallways, "telling me they would do things [sexual favors] to me." In relationships, it's the girl who usually presses for sexual intercourse first, he and his friend David agree.

"Their hormones are higher than guys' are now," David says.

(Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, the names of all the teen-agers interviewed for this story have been changed.)

Grace is 15. She and the three friends she's invited to her Coppell home today will be high school juniors in the fall. These four call themselves "the good girls," the ones who don't partake in brazen flirtation with boys, and certainly not all teens do. But Grace and company see that kind of behavior around them all the time at Coppell High School. Their female peers routinely dress to draw attention to themselves.

They'll wear "really short skirts," says Grace, seated cross-legged on her living room rug. "A lot of the girls wear thongs, or, like, no underwear."

"And they flaunt it. They're like, 'Oh, I dropped my pencil,'" adds Natalie, bending over in an imitation.

"Or guys will come up and flip their skirts," Catherine interjects.

It's so widely known that some girls do this, say Grace and her friends, that one boy brought a camera phone to school and stood at the bottom of the stairs to capture the peep show digitally. At Grapevine-Colleyville High School, says Janet, who will be a senior there this year, a favorite pose of the flirty girls is straddling the staircase banister, short skirts hiked up to accommodate their acrobatic position.

"I just find it gross what a lot of the girls do," she says.

Administration spokesmen at the Aledo and Coppell school districts say they are not aware of increased disciplinary measures against girls for violating dress codes or standards of behavior. A Fort Worth school district high school administrator, speaking on condition of anonymity, reports that dress-code violations are rampant among girls, many of whom wear one thing out the door at home and change into a racier outfit at school. The vast majority of fights between girls on school grounds, adds the administrator, are over boys.

Several years ago, tales of so-called "rainbow parties" began circulating, especially after the subject was raised on an episode of Oprah. Now the title of a controversial new book for teens by Paul Ruditis, the term "rainbow party" refers to an event at which girls wearing different colored lipsticks perform oral sex on the same boy.

Grace and her friends dismiss that phenomenon as rare, but relate other tales -- like girls who perform oral sex on boys they like to win them over.

"The old times, when the guy would court the girl" have changed, says Catherine. "The girl is the one who calls the guy now and stuff, in my experience. Sometimes, it's the other way around, but what I see is the guy will say, 'Hi,' but the girl is the one to pursue it. ... It's kind of like you're trying to sell a product; you're trying to sell yourself."

Anna, who is going into 11th grade, has been there. She describes herself as "really outgoing" and "flirtatious." When she was in ninth grade, she dressed in revealing low-cut shirts and short skirts, she says, in order to win friends. "The thing is, I was going into high school and I was like, 'How am I going to meet people, and what will guys respond to?'"

By the end of that school year, false rumors circulated about Anna's encounters with boys. She eventually did perform oral sex on a classmate whom she didn't even like, she says, because he was popular and "to make me feel better about myself." It didn't work. She felt awful and made a concerted effort that summer to buy more conservative clothing and not define herself by her appearance, she says.

Girls with reputations for being "easy" have populated high schools since high schools began. The difference, one expert says, is that what used to be considered "easy" is increasingly the norm today.

"I have seen a definite and sort of disturbing trend toward more aggressive sexual behavior in adolescent females," says David Welsh, a Fort Worth psychologist in private practice. Welsh consults for school districts across Fort Worth-Dallas and says that society has promoted the idea that "that's one way you demonstrate your maturity and your sophistication as a young female, [is to] initiate sexual activity.

"That's what the guys would brag about in the locker room," Welsh says. Now, he says, he sees "the same phenomenon among adolescent females."

Listen to how Craig, a recent graduate from Aledo High School, describes the sexual behavior of many girls in his experience:

"They don't want a relationship or anything, they just want to see if they can get the guy," and then they move on to their next conquest, he says. Sure, plenty of guys do the same, he adds, but "it's kind of switching roles now, it seems like."

In a recent survey of 1,000 teens by the nonprofit National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 51 percent of girls responded that girls are just as sexually aggressive as boys. Even more boys, 57 percent, thought so. And almost two-thirds (64 percent) of all the teens surveyed believed that girls were equally as sexually aggressive, if not more so.

Boys' life

There is no ignoring that women and girls still make up the vast majority of sexual harassment, abuse and rape victims. But boys, too, are feeling sexually bullied.

Fifteen-year-old Trey, who was shopping at Hulen Mall with friends last month, had sex for the first time this past school year. His girlfriend of two months had been pressuring him to have sex, says Trey, who attends Aledo High. Despite his repeatedly telling her, "I don't think I'm ready yet," he says she pushed the subject until Trey relented.

His 17-year-old friend Ryan had lost his virginity just a few days prior to this interview to a girl who, he jokingly says "raped" him. Both had been drinking alcohol, but the girl, Ryan says, was the one to initiate intercourse.

"There is a lot of pressure on girls to be dating," says Melanie Davis, a sex educator with the Unitarian Church in New Jersey and columnist for Mommasaid.net, "and girls are really out there in terms of what they want, some of them."

Pam, the mother of two boys at Fort Worth public schools, says that she was shocked when her freshman son reported that a girl who liked him was offering him oral sex. She was grateful her son shared the information with her but troubled by his nonchalance.

"He acted as if: 'Oh, that's what happens. Oh, Mom, you're so old.' And I'm thinking, 'I'm not that old, big fella.'"

Erin, another Fort Worth mom, has a 16-year-old son who doesn't date or talk much about girls. But that hasn't stopped his female peers from coming on to him. At a North Crowley High School function, a girl asked him to dance "and did a freak dance with him (i.e. simulated sexual intercourse)," says Erin, who got the scoop from her son's friends. She worries about both her teen-age sons when it comes to girls, "because I don't think the boys are savvy. And the girls are."

When he was in high school, Jill Reynolds' now-20-year-old son was showered with not just female attention but gifts, too.

"They would buy him things: shoes, sweat suits, jewelry, cologne," says Reynolds, a program director with the local YWCA AIM Program, "to get him."

Teen girls and boys say aggressive sexual behavior among girls is skewing younger and younger. And that presents an increasing problem for pre-teen boys, whose parents are often taken aback to find girls calling or instant-messaging their sons relentlessly. In a recent column on Mommasaid.net, Davis sought to answer parents' fears of "aggressive 12-going-on-16-year-old girls accosting our 12-going-on-8-year-old boys."

Girls in primary school are following the lead of their big sisters. As a teacher in a Dallas elementary school this year, Feyi Obamehinti, a parent in Euless, watched two fourth-grade girls skirmishing over a third-grade boy in the lunchroom. And Pam says that even when her boys were in kindergarten, they would come home in tears, reporting "how recess was ruined because little girls chased them the whole time trying to catch them and kiss them."

"It was hilarious in some ways," she adds. "But on the other hand, wow."

Society's role

What's behind this brash new standard of behavior in girls? Lots of factors, say Welsh and others. Society places a high premium on a woman's ability to attract men, as our daily media diet of scantily clad starlets proves. When teen girls see their idols -- Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton -- baring nearly all in movies and television commercials, many, like Anna, are bound to emulate that.

Music videos rival soft (and not-so-soft) porn in their sexual explicitness, and so do TV shows. Even the "good girls" like Grace and her friends were big fans of Sex and the City when it aired, unedited, on HBO. They were 13 years old then, and, for them, the show was like a sex-ed class on steroids.

Peruse the table of sexually suggestive T-shirts at popular teen clothier Abercrombie & Fitch, and it becomes clear just how brazen teen culture has become. Among the winking choices are shirts that read "Cunning linguist" and "Join me in the missionary."

(An Abercrombie T-shirt that says "Friend with privileges" might not appear to mean anything lewd but actually refers to "an interesting phenomenon ... ," notes Welsh, the Fort Worth psychologist: "Friends with favors, in which sexual behavior which usually stops short of intercourse is OK ... because we're just friends, and if it's not really intercourse, it's not really sex." One of Anna's three sexual partners, she says, was a boy who has been a friend since she was 7 years old.)

Parents can be a big part of the problem, too.

"I see a disturbing trend amongst a lot of parents where they actually encourage precocious sexual behavior in their daughters," says Welsh, "and I don't know that they realize that they're doing it."

Welsh cites as an example a junior cotillionlike event for fifth- and sixth-graders at which there is "ballroom dancing and everyone dresses up and takes out their daughters and their dates, and lets them have a table by themselves and exchange gifts and take pictures. [The adults] talk about how cute it is, but it's really allowing their children to engage in dating behaviors while their children are in elementary school."

Other parents are more overtly complicit. Pam, the Fort Worth mother of two boys, recalls that when her oldest was in the seventh grade he told her that he had been invited to a boy-girl slumber party. Pam, who was sure her son was mistaken, called the mother of the girl holding the party to clarify.

The mother confirmed that the sleepover would be co-ed. "It'll be fine," she told Pam, who informed the mother that "our family doesn't go for slumber parties with boys and girls."

There are parents, too, who remain mortified at the prospect of talking to their children about sex, Davis says.

"Often they will say that there is a fear that if they talk about it, it's like giving them permission," Davis explains. "Parents are almost afraid to enter the conversation because they're afraid what they might be asked."

But parents have a crucial responsibility to talk to their teens about where certain behaviors can lead, insists Davis, the mother of three teen girls. What is their daughter trying to ultimately gain by calling a boy constantly or by dressing in a sexy manner? Is she prepared for the consequences?

The consequences

In 2003, 62 percent of senior girls reported having had sex, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The kicker? Sixty-one percent of boys said they had lost their virginity. A statistical dead heat.

"When it comes to this question of who's having [teen] sex, the stereotype is it's 'all guys, all the time,' " says Bill Albert, communications director for the National Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "Girls have made the sexual playing field more level."

Still, the United States has seen an "extraordinary decline" in teen pregnancy and teen births between 1991 and 2003, Albert notes. The primary reasons, he says, are increased awareness of AIDS and use of contraceptives. Grace and her boyfriend of eight months talk openly about sex and have vowed not to have intercourse until married. They do partake in oral sex, though.

"I think it's sex," Grace says, "but not as [emotionally] deep."

She also says that she believes at least some of this new assertiveness by girls is a product of their feeling more empowered, and more comfortable with their sexuality.

"We shouldn't just sit back," Grace says, "and we should take control of our lives."

But if not carefully channeled, empowerment can be a dangerous thing, stresses Albert.

"If we mean by gender equity that girls feel comfortable in making their own decisions about sex and know very clearly that they shouldn't be forced into things that they don't want to do, then that's great," Albert says. "If the message is that girls can act now as poorly as boys have for years, that's not so great. And unfortunately, I think that what we have inadvertently done here is we've given teen girls a lot of the former, but not enough [guidance when it comes to] the latter."

Reynolds agrees.

"Some of it has to do with young ladies being able to assert themselves more," she says. "And when you don't have proper training with that assertion, lots of things can happen."

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Old 07-21-2005, 07:28 AM   #2
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Default RE: This so bugs me!

I think today there is much more burden on the parent to be proactive in raising their kids.
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Old 07-21-2005, 05:24 PM   #3
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Default RE:This so bugs me!

Quote:
Originally posted by: Lonely PSU Mavs Fan
I think today there is much more burden on the parent to be proactive in raising their kids.
Yep! And that is part of the problem. I have students whose parents are my age (I'm only 32 and teach 10th grade). Some of the paretns are friend instead of parent. It is actually quite sad! Not a lot I can do about it. I just try to be a positive role model and hope for the best!
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Old 07-22-2005, 09:24 AM   #4
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Default RE: This so bugs me!

This is way to scary a story for me. I have four daughters, two of which are teen agers now.

I hope I have taught them right from wrong. (I hope)

The one thing that has influenced me, and I truly believe is the answer to this issue --- keeping fathers involved in their daughters lives.
From what I have seen (I am pushing 40) -- that if you keep involved in your childrens lives... then they aren't searching for that "love". Everyone wants/needs love, and if they find that love from Jesus, as seen through a father figure, then they don't seem to have the "desire" to have to be controlled by any male because of the need to be loved.

I spend time with kids almost daily - coaching basketball and fastpitch softball. I actually saw a shirt the other day with DADD -- Dads Against Daughters Dating with crossed baseball bats on it..... the problem was it wasn't finished --- it should have also read 1) Keep Involved Dads 2) Keep them focused on the Lord 3) Keep them learning to work together while growing confidence in themselves.

This issue isn't going away. It isn't something new (just part of the coming back around... read up on some old Roman history). It isn't easy.

And let's face facts..... Most parents fail as parents because they are selfish, and don't want to parent....they are just to lazy to spend the time "showing" children that they really love them, by setting limits, and giving them a stable environment. They don't show kids how to handle problems properly...they run from them. They have forgotten that kids are the future, and they need to be "trained".......by the parent...not the schools, friends, TV, etc. Too bad most parents are too lazy to TEACH.............
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Old 07-22-2005, 10:35 AM   #5
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Default RE: This so bugs me!

first i will start out by being crass:

Where the hell were these girls when I was in school?


next, i will reveal that I was joking, and take a serious approach to the subject:

This is really something that is increasingly easy to notice. Hell, just go to any mall in america. I am simply AMAZED at what I see girls wearing in public, and how they act. blame can certianly fall on the parents, but I can't imagine what the peer pressure to partake in stuff like this must be like. there was enough peer pressure (to partake in sexual activities) when i was in high school, but it can't be anywhere near what it is today (and even reaches to a much younger age). and that's from a guy's perspective.
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Old 07-22-2005, 10:40 AM   #6
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Default RE:This so bugs me!

Quote:
Originally posted by: dalmations202
This is way to scary a story for me. I have four daughters, two of which are teen agers now.

I hope I have taught them right from wrong. (I hope)

The one thing that has influenced me, and I truly believe is the answer to this issue --- keeping fathers involved in their daughters lives.
From what I have seen (I am pushing 40) -- that if you keep involved in your childrens lives... then they aren't searching for that "love". Everyone wants/needs love, and if they find that love from Jesus, as seen through a father figure, then they don't seem to have the "desire" to have to be controlled by any male because of the need to be loved.

I spend time with kids almost daily - coaching basketball and fastpitch softball. I actually saw a shirt the other day with DADD -- Dads Against Daughters Dating with crossed baseball bats on it..... the problem was it wasn't finished --- it should have also read 1) Keep Involved Dads 2) Keep them focused on the Lord 3) Keep them learning to work together while growing confidence in themselves.

This issue isn't going away. It isn't something new (just part of the coming back around... read up on some old Roman history). It isn't easy.

And let's face facts..... Most parents fail as parents because they are selfish, and don't want to parent....they are just to lazy to spend the time "showing" children that they really love them, by setting limits, and giving them a stable environment. They don't show kids how to handle problems properly...they run from them. They have forgotten that kids are the future, and they need to be "trained".......by the parent...not the schools, friends, TV, etc. Too bad most parents are too lazy to TEACH.............

Great post, dalm.
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Old 07-22-2005, 11:03 AM   #7
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Default RE:This so bugs me!

Dalmations, great post.

I'm still in high school, and from my experience, this article is partly misleading. In my opinion, guys are still the ones pressuring for sex on a bigger scale. The girls ask for it by dressing provocatively, but for every slutty girl there's at least 4 or 5 that dress like normal girls. Many girls dress like that just to fit in.

For those of you who are teachers, you'll find that there are certain cliques of girls who fit this stereotype perfectly. These are the popular ones that drink and smoke and have sex and do bad things simply for the sake of rebelling. These are the girls that the guys go after, knowing that they're "easy", as the article explained.

I think both sexes are at fault here.
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Old 07-22-2005, 12:18 PM   #8
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Default RE: This so bugs me!

MTV.
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