***be careful with links in this post if***
****you struggle with sexualized images****
****you struggle with sexualized images****
This post is only partially thought-out at this point, but I'll probably be following up.
The more I look at sites like Facebook, MySpace and Youtube, and the more I see general advertising and reality TV behavior (trust me, I don't intentionally watch reality TV) the more I'm coming to believe that the ultimate goal in our society is HOTNESS. Attaining HOTNESS is the highest achievement in Gens X/Y/Z America.
And we're not talking about beauty. This is dirty-grinding-on-the-frat-floor HOTNESS.
Go log into MySpace or check out your Facebook friend list. You're probably already aware of this reality, but are you aware of how quickly it's happened? This is barely as old as online social networking - barely older than 2003 as MySpace climbed in popularity.
I remember hearing Dr. Drew Pinsky on Loveline talk with a 13 year-old-girl who was sexually active. He asked her, "what do you dream of doing?" trying to get her to think beyond the unhealthy behavior she was engaged in.
She giggled, "Honestly, I really want to be on Girls Gone Wild." So much for more women presidential candidates. And that's not me woman-bashing. These girls are trying to survive in an absentee-parent, predatorial society that has hypersexualized the bodies of pre-adolescent girls.
On the Superbowl Half Time show, the cameras kept cutting from Tom Petty to 18 year-old girls who didn't know the words to his songs. Every one of their movements was either seductive, erotic or just overtly, crassly sexual. As excited as they were to be on national television (one of the largest televised events in the world) their first thought wasn't, "Hi Mom and Dad!" It was to imitate the movements and motions of a late night Girls Gone Wild TV commericial. Seduce the camera. LOOK HOT.
Man, I sound old and lame.
And it's not just the girls. Facebook and Myspace are filled with suburban high school guys and college frat boys with their shirts pulled up, or off, flexing their abs, yanking down their beltlines... desperate for HOTNESS.
I'm really not a prude. Really. My wife and my close friends consider my humor to be vulgar by their standards. But this quest for HOTNESS is nothing less than web prostitution - not just of one's body through images and attached innuendo in comments boxes - but prostitution of identity. We're selling our humanity in exchange for a numeric rank, evaluating - not our beauty - but our HOTNESS...
please read more about my thoughts on the evolution of Christianity at www.emergingchristianity.blogspot.com/
