But because I like to give my uninformed 2 cents on everything - anybody who grew up in the showbusiness, with a dad who is in the showbusiness, is certainly not a little innocent girl that is not aware of her sexuality or the effect she has on the public. And she should dress up a bit more if she doesn’t want to come across as some little Lolita.

Could it be that middle-aged men are paying rather more attention to this whole thing than adolescent girls?

Even more incredible, huge numbers of Americans pretend that dressing up women in attractive ways and having them perform by dancing, acting, singing and charming others has NOTHING to do with sex. These are the same people who think that female cheerleaders are not, in any way, making sexual displays. They further believe that there is a stark line between innocent beauty pageants and lust-fueling sexual displays involving nudity and inviting the exchange of body fluids.

These binary-thinking people are so incredibly wrong. From the heterosexual male viewpoint, sexuality is a continuum running from the non-sexual (e.g., a locomotive, a brick, the American flag, a wristwatch) to the sexual (anything having to do with a physically healthy young woman or adult woman) to the sexy (young women or adult women dressed in ways that are socially recogized to be unambiguosly sexual). Along that continuum, we find things like little girls being dressed up in ways that advertise sexuality, strange religious rituals and grotesque beauty pageants for little girls.

We’re clearly in the post-fact era these days. Americans constantly encourage each other that things are the way they want them to be rather than the way they actually are. In keeping with this mass delusion, many Americans fervently want to believe that a young woman is not sexual until some magic moment pre-ordained by someone (or some corporation), at which point somehow a switch is flipped, and presto! Nothing objective has changed, but everything has somehow changed!

The consequences of this denial of the continuum of sexuality can destroy young minds.

This mass denial of the continuum of sexuality reminds me of the abstinence-only form of “sex education,” where advocates contend that the best way to deal with something is NOT dealing with it. On this topic of “abstinence only sex education,” check out this Jon Stewart video.

Back in Ozzie and Harriet times, people were able to pretend that Peyton Place was “somewhere else”, and that Kinsey was just dirty minded. But in this age of easy information, it is hard to understand why people still pretend that back when the marrying age for girls was typically under 14, people were different. Once those hormones start running, you can’t really stop teens from acting on them.

As long as we live in a culture that tries to hide things like death and sex from kids, they will be forbidden fruit in the temptingest sense. And there will be those who profit from the dichotomy.

The nominal line between child and adult always will be fuzzy. But it would be nice to live in a culture that publicly allowed kids to look ahead and see the joys and the dangers of both the fuzzy line itself, and what lies beyond in adulthood.