Yesterday I attended a family celebration in honor of my little niece’s First Holy Communion. The guest of honor, my niece, is in the second grade and is a beautiful, vibrant child—blond hair, blue eyes with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose. In her white Communion dress, she looked like a little angel.
It was a sunny day and a pleasant get-together. Most of the guests had left when my niece and her friend, another little girl, wanted to put on a “show” for those of us who remained. We, of course, agreed to be the audience.
With a video clip from the Internet providing the music, the girls sang and danced to the song Beggin’ On Your Knees by Victoria Justice.
I was horrified.
Victoria Justice
Victoria Justice is 18 years old. She has been performing since the age of 10, and has acted in several TV shows on Nickelodeon. Without a doubt, she is a beautiful, talented singer and dancer. But she is also selling sex to little girls.
Here’s the video of Beggin’ On Your Knees.
The video is slick, obviously packaged by entertainment executives and corporate bigwigs to appeal to tweens—and younger. It’s set on a seaside amusement pier, with the actors playing arcade games and going on rides. The performers, of course, represent a nice multicultural mix—I’m sure the money men don’t want to miss any marketing opportunities.
So Victoria Justice sings about her relationship with some guy, and how he cheats on her. The chorus goes like this:
and One day i’ll have you begging on your knees for me
yeah, One day i’ll have you crawling like a centipede
You mess with me?
And mess with her!
So I’ll make sure you get what you deserve
yeah, One day you’ll be begging on your knees for me
So my little niece, who a few hours earlier was angelic in her white Communion dress, was shaking her body and crawling on the floor as she sang along to Beggin’ On Your Knees.
She, of course, had no idea what the words meant. But the messages are there for anyone to see: Girls achieve success by attracting good-looking boyfriends. Good-looking boyfriends cheat on their girlfriends. When cheating happens, girls take revenge.
Gee—when I was my niece’s age, I watched Shirley Temple sing Animal Crackers in My Soup.
Cheerleaders
This isn’t the first time I was struck by the blatant sexual messages being communicated to young girls. A few months ago, friends were in Atlantic City to watch their daughter perform in a big cheerleading competition. They invited my husband and I to join them.
This girl is a senior in high school and has been cheerleading since she was young. Approximately 3,000 girls were participating in this competition, ranging from high school age to girls my niece’s age—or younger.
As I walked around Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, I could not believe my eyes. All of the girls, down to the youngest ones, were parading around in cheerleading costumes that featured off-the-shoulder tops, bare midriffs and extremely short skirts. They all wore heavy make-up. They were all being taught to strut, show what they’ve got, and smile.
Abusive dating
I, in the meantime, am preparing to talk to another group of high school students about Sociopaths and Abusive Dating Relationships.
Part of my message is that sociopaths use sex to trap their victims. If you’re lonely, you are vulnerable. And when you have sex, you form a psychological bond that makes it difficult to get away if the person turns out to be an abuser. This is how domestic violence starts.
Yet according to the constant bombardment of messages directed towards young girls, their success depends on how sexy they are, and whether they can attract a hot boyfriend. Any girl without a boyfriend, therefore, will feel lonely, and will be vulnerable to the abuse of a sociopath.
So how do I compete with overwhelming, lifelong marketing? How do I tell these high school students that sex may get them in trouble when they’ve been fed a steady diet of “sex sells” since they were little kids?
Girls are being brainwashed by marketers out to make a buck. I don’t even know how parents can protect their kids from the onslaught—they’d have to raise their daughters in a cocoon. As a result, so many little girls are probably ripe to become the next generation of victims of sociopaths.
Yesterday, a 4 y/o was found neglected & starved to death, by his aunt & her boyfriend. BUT, get this, The neighbors saw 4 children always playing in the yard, & they NEVER knew that another child was in the house. NOW, Imagine what thoes 4 children are used to seeing, at home? Did the children think that the abuse is normal? I doubt the children will get the help they need, as they become adults.
Hmmm, while I understand the concept of the “golden child”… There was one thing that I found suspect. It mentioned that empathy is learned and a “behaviour”. I put some question marks with that statement. Stranger even, the article seems to say that learning empathy can only be done in very young childhood, so young that a child won’t remember it anymore.
If a “behaviour” is acquired only through learning, then it makes little sense to me it could only happen at such and such stage in development. It would imply that the degree of empathy one feels would depend on how it was taught. An Empath would be the opposite of a Psycho. Hence the baby must have gotten a lot of lessons on empathy, while it was at such an unconscious age, it can’t even remember that time.
Weird… when it comes to learning a “behaviour”
First, empathy is not a behaviour at all, it is a skill, and one that seems neurologically inborn to the majority of people. A neurological study presented on a symposium of scientists of different skills (social, neurological, antropologic, physicatry, etc) organized by Richard Dawkins showed how that if a person got pricked with a needle in their fingertip an erea in the frontal cortex would light up (that is get more oxygen, and thus more blood, and thus more active). If that person was then later to see someone else being pricked with a needle in the fingertip, the same area in the witness’ brain would light up again. This strongly suggests that we feel the pain inflicted upon someone else as if it was done to us, even if isn’t.
So, the study above suggests there is an inborn potential for empathy or there is not. It may not be there if a child is born with certain brain damage or deficit for needed neurotransmitters. Such brain damage or problems with neurotransmitters can also be caused through head trauma or a hormonal imbalance. Another way to damage the neurological ability to experience someone’s pain as your own, would be through forcing the mind to use escape routes away from pain. Dissociation is a mental flight response for people to escape their own pain. Once a certain neurological link is made in the brain, even a faulty one, it is hard to get it undone again. If the brain has been taught to use dissociation for mental survival during or after trauma, then it is more likely to keep doing that. The neurological pathway becomes like a track in farming land. Even if the farmer attempts to shift the tracks, the tools end up dipping back into the old track. If someone dissociates from their own pain, and thus avoids feeling pain, then that person will also certainly use it to avoid experiencing pain by witnessing someone else’s pain. In this way, abuse can lead to people who may have the potential to empathize not to feel any type of empathy at all.
So, it seems to me far more realistic for the author to state that empathy is a potential, but ended up being blunted.
Sometimes this stuff is easier to interrupt than we think. It just takes some courage and willingness to stick our necks out a bit to stand up for what’s right.
At the time of the Columbine shootings I worked for a telecom company with very good employee benefits (compensation for working you almost literally to death…). Most people were decent, but there was a fairly laissez-faire attitude. I was taking a break in the staff lounge that had, amongst other things, a MASSIVE flat-screen tv alongside computer gaming stations installed with all kinds of toys including some of the latest war games. So I vividly remember watching the live coverage of the panicked students escaping while two of my co-workers were simultaneously playing war games where they were stalking each other with assault rifles while wearing combat uniforms. I didn’t say anything, but someone else obviously did. The very next day the gaming stations were removed. My company had sent out a very clear message that they had reconsidered their position, and that type of leisure activity would no longer be tolerated.
From that point on we were a much less laissez-faire corporate culture. And all it took was two people to make that change – one to speak up and the other to appropriately respond and do something about it.
@darwinsmom,
“So, it seems to me far more realistic for the author to state that empathy is a potential, but ended up being blunted.”
Brilliant observation.
Annie and Darwinsmom,
Can’t recall where I read the study (CRS!) but I did read a psychological study on infants showing empathy at a very early age, about 8 months, I think….and it seems that a certain amount of empathy is more or less ingrained in children from a very early age.
That empathy can be “smothered” though, I firmly believe, or it can be “cultivated” by the caregivers….
Annie, the “war games” and the terrible violence in television and other visual media, as well as in music (or what passes for music) I believe has a profound impact on the youth of today. Even the rapid fire television cartoons and programs aimed at young children I think contributes to the kids having to be “entertained” with rapid stimulation…rather than the kids exploring their environment and learning by doing.
Sheila, I agree with you that lack of respect for girls and women is being taught to our young men as well…to view “conquests” of girls and women as almost a sport. It probably doesn’t help much with your son that your X doesn’t seem to have much use for women either…or that he takes such an attitude about “boys will be boys.”
Ayleh, yes… it is not just fairytales. This is the cultural gender type teaching, true.
I still maintain that the original little mermaid version (not the Disney one) is the sole one that I know that actually wants to teach a woman not to change herself to cater for a man.
But not all of it is culturally taught. I was raised as a single child, and luckily for myself, my parents bought both cars, lego as well as dolls for me to play with. I was encouraged to play with both.
My first memory, is of my 2nd birthday at the home of my daycare mother while my mother went out working. For the birthday party there were 3 giant kid sunglasses with big monocolored rims: one red, one blue and one yellow. Now, I was pretty particular about the colors I preferred: red and green. Those were strong colors for me, whereas blue and yellow just seemed “weak” colors to me. I thought of them as little ninny colors for girls who would act very girlish. To own the truth, I kinda wished I could be a boy at the time, and red and green were boy colors to me.
Unfortunately for me, the girl that was a few months older than me, had picked one of the sunglasses before her turn, and she picked the red one.
I felt (a) envious that she had the red one (b) an injustice had been done to me cause it was my birthday after all (c) a great shame for being envious. The reason I probably remember it at all is because I had these three big emotions all bundled together at once. Most people do not remember things from before 5, except if a strong sensation or emotion is involved.
The shame won out. I didn’t say a word at all, and instead picked the blue sunglasses, and walked around with them for the rest of the day, feeling pretty miserable about it.
I never told either my parents or my daycare mother until I was 12 during a re-visit for old times’ sake at the daycare mom.
The only tangible reminders to help me retain that memory are the pictures of that day. And when wearing the crown with 2 you see a toddler with a big grin, icecream running down the chin. It was taken before the sunglasses were being picked. And then pictures of toddlers with sunglasses in the couch, but the smile of the toddler with the blue sunglasses is subdued, more forced.
As I said, I was a single child. I had no children at home to compete with. And no situations where my parents had to teach me to be ashamed if I were to take a toy away from another child. My daycare mother even told me on that re-visit what an easy child I was. She never needed to reprimand me for taking someone else’s toys. It was just something I did not do out of my own accord.
For me this memory is important because it’s anecdotal evidence that people might have strong inborn ethics that they never need to be taught: justice and fairness, not being an egotist and esthetical values in my example above. It suggests also that the boyish-versus-girly view of the world is inborn and does not come from teaching alone. The only other girl I knew at the daycare mother’s house was as much a tomboy as I was, and neither my mom nor the daycare mom were “girly”. I can’t for the life of me imagine where this “girly” idea originated from, because I did not even have girly girls in my surroundings at the time.
I got over the not-wanting-to-be a girl fairly rapidly, probably because my mother was a good role model that proved to me that a warm, loving motherfigure (archetype of a woman) could also be strong an assertive and do her own thing in life.
I agree Oxy. I see empathy similarly as IQ (logical intelligence). You may be as bright as Einstein, but without any nurturing of the potential, chances are the person won’t come up with a formula to explain the correlations between nature’s forces. You may have a high creative talent, but when it’s not encouraged and even discouraged, the chances are unlikely you end up being a Picasso, Dali or Miro.
There are different kind of IQs–from emotional intelligence to logical intelligence, to “talents” such as perfect pitch, or creativity, and our genetics make up a great deal of the potential for these different forms of IQ and talent, as well as our empathy or lack of it, and then you factor in the actual versus the potential for each of these and the changes that are made by environment and we become individuals who are a mix of both genetics and a product of our environment and opportunities.
It started to become apparent during WWII about babies who were “well cared for ” but not cuddled and nurtured died at an alarming rate with a “failure to thrive” syndrome…and I have actually seen the same thing in infants who were born to young mothers who didn’t really know how to hold and cuddle their infants. I’ve seen failure to thrive in older children who experienced high stress levels due to divorce and insecurity, and they actually stopped growing to an alarming level. Their normal growth hormone levels would drop to almost zilch though their pituitary glad was normal…
Stress can do a number on our bodies, minds, thinking, and behavior.
Trauma bonds (the book by Patrick carnes is great!) which is essentially stockholm syndrome, makes slaves stay with their masters, made Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart and Patty Hearst stay with their captors and identify with them. It is said that 85% of abused women return to their abusers….trauma bonds. What can be done to break this cycle? Education before the abuse and education and support when the victims try to escape. Unfortunately, the support is not always there, so people return to the “devil they know” rather than face life uncertainly without support.
Here’s a list of all the 9 types of intelligences:
http://skyview.vansd.org/lschmidt/Projects/The%20Nine%20Types%20of%20Intelligence.htm
Darwinsmom,
Agree….some people are born with strong empathy and ethical values with out being trained by example. This is the element that is lacking in Sociopaths neurologically all togehter, based on scientific studies I’ve read elsewhere.
Being girly or manly is an equal part of genetic XY and XX chromosone as it is learned behaviour from our role models. My sister is a tomboy and her daughter is a supper girly girl. My sons were raised with no toy guns or violent games in our home, yet they made the gun symbol with their hands as soon as they were todlers. I remember being shocked because they were not exposed to it, yet they playd the shoot’em’up bang bang game any way!
Our current society plays tremendous importance on role playing and gilrs being sexy. Boys are taught they need to be “men” at an early age by the equal suggestion that being provocative and sexual at an early age proves their masculinity.
I have a 23 year old son who has only had one girl friend and he can not stand the way girls come on to him! He thinks for the most part they are petty and only interested in sex. He’s looking for substance…..Imagine that!!!! my son is considered an outcast by most of his peers because he dosent party and partake in the games. My 20 year old son has taken ful responsibility for his 20 year old girlfriend….and is playing the care taker role model….. Maybe I did raise a men that are considerate of women as people. I sure hope I did! time will tell.