the raunch trend

"Girls Gone Raunch" (Macleans September 26th) begins:

She and her friends talk about it constantly. How to go out and have a great time. How to make their way through a sexual landscape that somehow has upped the ante in racy behavior. The challenge, says Shauna (not her real name) a 20-year-old third year psychology major at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario, is how not to feel like a misfit just because she thinks that sexual titillation factor has gone too far...

Judith Timson’s article goes on to define what the raunch culture consists of, borrowing liberally from the observations of Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs a book that examines the raunch phenomenon in depth.

...there is, if anything, more pressure than ever to look not just good but bodacious... combined with a certain sleaziness that is everywhere in the culture...

...girls and young women today put presure on themselves not just to be pretty and popular...but to be "hot." Hot, hot, hot. Even Olympic athletes, with their gorgeously powerful bodies have to be hot.... Even top-ranked female tennis stars have to be hot, showing up for play with a hint of cleavage and a skin-tight ensemble.

...high school girls in particular are looking "for that new way to get more attention. I interviewed high school students and they were always telling me that at their dances and parties girls were constantly giving guys lap dances or making out with each other to attract attention to themselves..thinking ‘what kind of performance can I put on that’s going to be slightly more provocative than the last performance.’"

Now Timson and Levy decry this trend, not because of the moral implications of daring wardrobes, sexual acting out and pornographic overtones. "I’m for more sexual liberation not less," Levy declares, "and I don’t think the answer is more chastity. I’m not here to outlaw pornography or impose a minimum-fabric requirement for high school girls." Their problem with it is the way it violates the gains in self-respect and feminine ‘progress’ supposedly made by feminist forbears.

I couldn’t give a hoot what this raunch culture says about the progress of feminism, because it violates something far bigger than that. I’m just glad I don’t have a tween to twenty unmarried daughter these days! I know how intense the pressure to conform can be and how hard it is to convince kids who just want to fit in, that passages like 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Peter 3 have any relevance to modern life at all, let alone to them. May God empower Christian parents today with courage to withstand this trend!