A Scary Time to Raise a Daughter

Three months ago, with my wife’s contractions getting closer and closer, we flicked on the TV as a distraction before going to the hospital.

Bad idea.

No one expects a great deal of enlightenment from the tube these days. But as we switched from one tawdry and vapid reality or dating show to another, I wondered if we should have our heads examined for bringing a child into this world.

Especially a girl.

It’s not just television that scares me. It’s the Internet, pop music, radio, advertising. The most lurid elements of each medium now dominate pop culture, and the incessant, pounding message, directed primarily at young people, is that it’s all about sex.

Sure, some of us boomers had our flower child days of free love, but that was a social revolution, not a corporate-driven campaign.

Today, if you haven’t just had it, you’re a loser. If you don’t expect to have it in the immediate future, try plastic surgery, because sex appeal -- the one true standard of human achievement -- is the only thing worth aspiring to.

Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m frazzled about all of this because I have a baby girl. Each day, I feel a little more like Dan Quayle, who was once ridiculed for wagging a finger at television’s Murphy Brown, an unwed mom.

Where’s Dan Quayle when you need him?

At my daughter’s first checkup, our pediatrician mentioned that he routinely has pregnant patients in their early teens. I shook my head and said it’s no wonder, given what kids see on TV and the Internet.

Forget that, the doctor said. Go for a drive and take a look at some billboards. Belts are unbuckled. Bras are undone. Everyone is on the make.

While contemplating these horrors as a new dad, I got an e-mail one day from actress Susan Dey, who has volunteered at the Rape Treatment Center in Santa Monica for 15 years.

Dey was America’s grooviest teenager in a more innocent media era -- she played Laurie on “The Partridge Family.” She told me she had gotten an unsolicited e-mail directing her to a Web site with college girls having live sex. Dey checked it out and was horrified at what is essentially a guide for frat boys on how to nail coeds.

“A little alcohol will always loosen up the college chicks!” the site advises, complete with graphic results.

“These are the girls we see at the rape center,” Dey said with disgust.

Gail Abarbanel, director of the center, said 50% of rape victims are 18 or younger, and the rapists are acquaintances 80% of the time.

“We see a lot of cases where raped women are incapacitated by drugs or alcohol, sometimes surreptitiously,” Abarbanel said. “We even have a few cases where victims have been tagged.”

The rapist will use a felt-tip pen to mark his conquest, she said, just as a gang banger leaves his tag on a wall.

When I asked Abarbanel what was going on, she said kids are saturated as never before with marketing and entertainment that’s all about sex and violence. Subtlety and restraint are quaint, nostalgic notions, as is attentive parenting.

Another factor, I think, is that very little in the culture encourages independent thinking, and that makes peer pressure all the more powerful. “Look at what’s happening with oral sex in the bathrooms of middle schools,” Abarbanel said, telling me that, in workshops at local schools, they hear stories about how commonplace it’s become.

I’ve got friends who told me they turn the radio off while taking their kids to school, because it’s routine to hear shock jocks carrying on about oral sex. Next time I was in my car, I flipped through the FM dial and, in nothing flat, found that very thing on two stations.

A couple of weeks after we met, Dey called again to say I ought to have a look at the photos in the Abercrombie & Fitch store at the Grove in the Fairfax District. We met there Thursday and took a tour.

On both floors of the store, which markets to a young crowd, the walls were plastered with huge blowups of fresh-faced, great-looking teens who are either nude or nearly nude.

In one, a topless girl is playing the violin while in the clutches of a shirtless boy, and a carefully placed strand of hair is all that keeps her from being completely revealed.

In another, a naked girl is sandwiched by two boys, her breasts completely visible but for a bit of strategic air brushing. The three of them are holding a blanket over what appear to be nude lower bodies.

An odd advertising campaign, you’d have to say -- all this nudity being used to sell clothes.

It’s all about an image, a clerk explained.

Yeah, I gathered as much.

“The message is, you should be a sexual object,” Dey said outside the store. “Like I’ve been saying, connect the dots.”

She had been telling me the problem isn’t the photos in the store, or billboards on the street, or TV shows, or movies, or the Internet. It’s all of those things together.

“I taught my daughter to love her body, but that’s not what this is about,” Dey said. “A boy’s not cool if he hasn’t just done it. His whole manhood is at stake. I don’t think we were ever targeted the way they’re targeting this generation, and when does it stop?

“I would love it if parents said, ‘No, I’m not putting my credit card down for this.’ Can you imagine what would happen if parents said to Madison Avenue, ‘I want my 13-year-old to be a 13-year-old’? “

*

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.