OK, this post is all Lizzie's fault. She started in with the whole ass-crack thing, and that got me thinking (it takes so little to do that). But that's what blog friends are for.
So I'm in Louisville for the day before flying out tonite to Jackson, MS for the week. (I'm not sure if I've ever even set foot in Mississippi before. So those impressions are to come.) But over the last four years in Louisville, the group of us at the crash pad have made pretty much a daily pilgrimage to a Qdoba Mexican restaurant a couple blocks from here. This is for a couple reasons: one, they have a really good menu of pretty healthy food for the couple of health nuts among us (No, not me! God! Nobody every accused me of being obsessed with any silly ideas of culinary quality beyond the sacrosanctity of Peanut M&Ms); and two, this place seems to be a required stop-over for every attractive woman under 30 in the city of Louisville.
Guys will be guys. Even happily married guys.
But the ass crack thing. Lunch time at Qdoba involves sharing the airspace with, among other noteworthy creatures, a gaggle of girls from the nearby Assumption High School. School girls in uniforms. I mean, come on. There's a whole frickin' porn industry arising from this fantastic image! Just like in the videos, they all wear their little plaid mini skirts and white button-down collared shirts, or some, "Assumption" athletic wear. (Always knowing just the right thing to say, one of my roomies unfailingly taunts another roomie, one with a teenaged daughter, that "Assumption" means "Assume she's takin' it up the tailpipe!" His mind leaps, like any good father's, to the worst possible scenario.)
Yeah, it's crass, but here's the deal: these girls come in for lunch looking for all the world like Victoria's Secret runway models. And it's a studied thing. Yeah, I know I'm a lecherous 43-year-old, but I swear to God this is not all just me! I can appreciate the wonders of youth with the best of them, but this is something else. The collared shirts are removed to reveal a way too-tight t-shirt with a push-up bra, or the buttons are undone and the tails of the shirt are tied tightly beneath the breasts. The skirt waistbands are rolled down until each girl has a Christina Aguilera amount of hip showing (I can imagine the schoolgirl handbook: "Roll down until you get fur, and then take one roll back out"). I'm not a prude; but this all just makes a fella wonder. Now, if this is what the nuns had in mind I'll just have to rethink my whole take on Catholic school. Especially if I had a son. And especially if I had a daughter.
No, I'm pretty sure this, er, presentation is something special for the lunch crowd, an explicit transformation for the brief release from school for lunch. But they sit in groups all around among us while we eat, and the most cursory eavesdropping reveals what common sense tells you, that this is an advertisement by 15-year-olds of a product not yet on the shelves. Am I really that old? Is this simply what it is to be "cute" and not unfashionably frumpy in the crushing peer-pressure-cooker of high school? Is this what Britney Spears hath wrought?
Or should we all just be grateful that Wunelle has no kids?
12 comments:
Having been a councilor for several teen programs, I can assure you this IS planned, and the product, as sad as it is, IS on the shelves.
Private schools make the students want, ever more, to reveal their privates.
Joshua
Yeah, I guess I do understand that, at 15, there is sexual experimentation going on. That's what happens at 15, and sooner in boys.
But what surprises me is what seems like the aggressive marketing of the sexuality as seemingly a first step in exploration. Maybe I've just overlooked what has already been a couple-year-long odyssey for these girls, but I know a lot of adult women who are not comfortable projecting this kind of sexual advertising!
Or were our parents saying the same things about us while we laughed at their backwardness?
I think the only thing I ever advertised was the aforementioned plumber's crack. And that appeals to only the rarest of fetishes!
I think it's a sign of how we are becoming sexualised at younger and younger ages. It's really sad.
Oh, and I was a Catholic schoolgirl... *cough*
I think you're normal and they're typical.
Unfortunate, but true.
Hey, Mango, tell us some of the other juicy details from the Catholic School Girl's Handbook!
what Britney Spears hath wrought indeed! there's a reason she was able to forge an entire career on the strength of one naught schoolgirl video.
I was in high school in the mid-90s which wasn't that long ago (really! it wasn't!) and I *know* it wasn't like this back then. Sure, you had girls trying to look sexy but it wasn't nearly to this level.
I wonder what the backlash will look like. turtlenecks and burlap sacks? Because, you know, there's always a backlash.
Yes indeed that outfit would go well with my "fabulous fuck me boots".
Speaking of ass crack, the other day I saw a teenage girl sitting outside of a restaurant with her entire ass hanging out, on a main road in the middle of DC. I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and tell her that I'm sure her parents would be ashamed that she's letting her ass hang out on Wisconsin Avenue. But I resisted that urge.
Maybe the backlash will be in the form of a pilot's uniform and I'll suddenly and unwittingly find myself so damn stylish! (Though the company dress code expressly says that the shirt is to remain tucked in, thus forever depriving the world of the very plumber's crack that could be my ticket out of this place!)
Come on, you'd love to wear one of these glorified bus driver hats! And epaulets. Admit it.
(And Lizzie, if you think "mid-90s" sounds bad, try NINETEEN FRICKIN' EIGHTY!)
And Heather, what did you expect on Wisconsin Avenue?
hey now! I live on Wisconsin! oh, who am I kidding? you're right, we're all slutbags ;-)
It's just that, well, Wisconsin is not such an inspired name for a noble street.
And I oughtta know!
I might be going out on a limb, here, but hell, when has that ever stopped me?
I think this "problem" probably goes back farther than we all want to admit. It was just a century ago that it was the norm for women to be married off by the time they were 15, and have three or four kids by the time our modern women are graduating from high-school. Is it such a suprise then, that after the short space of 100 years we are still lusting after what we now consider "under-aged" women? And is it such a suprise that, during the sexual liberation of women, these women are learning the trade secrets that much earlier?
I just want to leave on one comment that has gotten me in a lot of trouble: Women are designed, by biology, to have children at a far younger age than is the average in America today. Directly after puberty, but before "maturation" these bodies are better adapted to birth: they heal faster, recover faster emotionally and physically, and are in better health for the baby.
Perhaps, and I am not sure how much of this I am willing to accept, the fault here is on society, for emotionally stifling our youth into rebelling into somethign they are already equipped to handle otherwise. They go on muddling though it when they could easily be taught the right ways through it. And then we blame them for muddling.
Just some thoughts.
Joshua
One word: Lolita.
Of course, you're correct in that we might really only understand this by stripping the modern cladding of polite society away to look at our animal origins underneath. (I never get past the ever-more impressive crop of back hair that is arriving with middle age.) Not to advocate that we return to pre-civilization community models, but I suppose we'll only really understand things by knowing the instincts and urges and genetic proclivities underneath.
I think actually women are tending to menstruate earlier and earlier even in the time of recorded history. Even so, I imagine the onset of puberty (historically) at 14 or 15 was intended, biologically, to correlate the obvious physical changes in a woman's body (to which men are so very attuned) to her physical ability to bear children. From the POV of evolutionary biology, this is, after all, the only reason we're here.
None of this, of course, should be taken as advocacy by me that these vaunted uniformed Catholic schoolgirls bear children any sooner than they and their families think is appropriate. Or that they change their dress codes in any way. At least so long as I continue to lunch at Qdoba.
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