Common sense is all too often a casualty of the media culture we live in. Parents assume the sexual content and innuendo in the programming they are watching will go over their child's head, or think it's cute to dress their child in sexy clothes or encourage her to imitate Beyonce's dance moves so they can post it on YouTube. In reality, they are teaching their children what kind of behavior will help them get noticed.

...Everyone in society suffers when children are sexualized, but those hurt worst are the children themselves. In February 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report on the sexualization of girls that found that girls' exposure to hypersexualized media content can negatively impacts their cognitive and emotional development; is strongly associated with eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression; leads to fewer girls pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; and causes diminished sexual health.

But it's not just our daughters who are being affected by these images. Boys and adult men are also learning to value women only for their sex appeal, which the report says can lead to increased incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and increased demand for child pornography.

- excerpt. Melissa Henson, CNN

The really frustrating thing about the “Save the boobies” campaign and similar ones is that it gets it exactly backward. Often, the point of breast cancer treatment is to destroy some or all of the boobies in order to save the woman.

Saying that we should work to cure this disease because it threatens breasts is really upsetting. For starters, it suggests that women are worth saving because they’re attached to breasts, rather than the other way around. But worse, it tells any woman who’s had a life-saving mastectomy that she’s given up the thing that made people care about her survival. What a punch in the stomach.

Randall Munroe, writer of xkcd


thank you, sir. and amen.

by tom matlack for HP.

Most of the guys I know are unfulfilled, looking at pictures of women they will never meet (moreover, these women don't actually, technically, exist). They prefer making love with a woman who stirs their passions on more than one level. But we have been conditioned like so many Pavlovian dogs.

Yes, good men love women. But we love women in all their complexity -- for the things they do, for their intelligence, their wit, their athleticism, their creativity, their power and their force of personality. We seem to have forgotten that along the way. Our brain-numbing intoxication by pornography in all its forms threatens to end us -- not because it is morally wrong, but just because it distracts us from the truth and scatters our power. It's one big acid trip fantasy with no connection to improving our lives, being good fathers and husbands and advancing our careers.

The models I have met in the flesh have all turned out to be quite unattractive. When a supposedly beautiful woman opens her mouth and soulless, empty nonsense tumbles out, the perfect 10 becomes a two in a big hurry. No amount of cleavage can make up for the lack of soul.

You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t. It’s a bad word, ‘belong.’ Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn’t be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can’t even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don’t wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can’t own a human being. You can’t lose what you don’t own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don’t, do you? And neither does he. You’re turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can’t value you more than you value yourself.

-toni morrison