It's my birthday. The first thing I checked was my blogger profile, which confirms I am suddenly one year older; six hours into the last year of my sixth decade. While big deal, eh? What's so special about a birthday?
A birthday is a time to reflect on the past year, s sort of personal New Year's Day that you only share with just over a quarter of one percent of your fellow human beings. The most significant event of my last year was that my elder daughter and her husband made me a grandfather and my wife a grandmother. A quarter of a century after our girls ceased to be little, we again have a little girl.
Now, with no disrespect intended to little boys, nothing to my mind is so life affirming as a little girl in a pretty dress. She becomes joy personified. I mean pure joy, the simple exhilaration of being alive. There isn't anything prurient about it, just a reminder that for all its faults, life on this planet can be worthwhile.
Why then - and this is brought to mind by the recent developments in the JonBenét Ramsey case - do some adults insist on gilding the lily? That little girl - be she my grandaughter, your daughter or just a neighbourhood kid playing in the park - doesn't need head-to-toe makeup or sequins or jewelry except maybe a simple gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket. Okay, perhaps a small cross or whatever religious symbol her parents might choose.
She doesn't need high boots. let alone high heels. She needs rain boots if it's raining and snowboots if it's snowing, but then she'll be wearing a raincoat or a snowsuit. High-heeled hooker boots she doesn't need.
I think all that junior beauty contest stuff just panders to the pedophile. Why the pedophile finds the little girl, or little boy for that matter, an object of sexual attraction is beyond me. It is also beyond our justice system that treats pedophilia as just another crime when it's probably a mental disorder. Of course, the justice system treats drug addiction the same way. Twenty-first century North America has the world's best nineteenth century criminal justice and penal systems.
Most women spend a good deal of time and money making themselves as attractive as possible. When a woman overdoes it, what do we say? She looks like a whore! So what are we to think when a parent, usually a mother, overdoes it for her daughter? What is she trying to tell the world about her little girl?
A birthday is a time to reflect on the past year, s sort of personal New Year's Day that you only share with just over a quarter of one percent of your fellow human beings. The most significant event of my last year was that my elder daughter and her husband made me a grandfather and my wife a grandmother. A quarter of a century after our girls ceased to be little, we again have a little girl.
Now, with no disrespect intended to little boys, nothing to my mind is so life affirming as a little girl in a pretty dress. She becomes joy personified. I mean pure joy, the simple exhilaration of being alive. There isn't anything prurient about it, just a reminder that for all its faults, life on this planet can be worthwhile.
Why then - and this is brought to mind by the recent developments in the JonBenét Ramsey case - do some adults insist on gilding the lily? That little girl - be she my grandaughter, your daughter or just a neighbourhood kid playing in the park - doesn't need head-to-toe makeup or sequins or jewelry except maybe a simple gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket. Okay, perhaps a small cross or whatever religious symbol her parents might choose.
She doesn't need high boots. let alone high heels. She needs rain boots if it's raining and snowboots if it's snowing, but then she'll be wearing a raincoat or a snowsuit. High-heeled hooker boots she doesn't need.
I think all that junior beauty contest stuff just panders to the pedophile. Why the pedophile finds the little girl, or little boy for that matter, an object of sexual attraction is beyond me. It is also beyond our justice system that treats pedophilia as just another crime when it's probably a mental disorder. Of course, the justice system treats drug addiction the same way. Twenty-first century North America has the world's best nineteenth century criminal justice and penal systems.
Most women spend a good deal of time and money making themselves as attractive as possible. When a woman overdoes it, what do we say? She looks like a whore! So what are we to think when a parent, usually a mother, overdoes it for her daughter? What is she trying to tell the world about her little girl?
posted by Ooten Aboot | Saturday, August 19, 2006
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