(leaving my password live only encourages me.)
On my last post, several commenters discussed the mistreatment of Chelsea Clinton, which began the minute she hit Washington. During her father’s White House years, she was a teenager; in fact, not yet one when he was inaugurated. She was awkward, and people said the nastiest things about her. Famously, Rush Limbaugh called her the “White House Dog.” He’s pretended since that this was a mistake, a thin veneer that even he can’t maintain with a straight face. John McCain also famously told a vile joke that both attacked her looks and gay/trans-baited Janet Reno, which if you have not heard you will hear during the campaign.
Yeah, we get it. She wasn’t particularly attractive in her early teens. In fact, we so completely got it that (as Zuzu recalled) “Leave Chelsea Alone” shirts by the company “Don’t Panic” (they also of “I can’t even think straight,” for those of us that remember their omnipresence around the time of the 1993 march on Washington) became a piece of political history.
Patriarchy, by definition, is a system where women can never win. Most of us are unattractive, and very awkward, as preteens and young teens, but our culture reduces young women (and not young men) to their appearance. It can’t possibly feel good to receive the dual message that (1) your value is principally about your looks; and (2) you are not attractive.
And what happens when a young woman comes into her looks early, so that when she’s eleven or thirteen, adult men are just stunned by her beauty? When she’s so self-confident and poised that she can hold her own next to celebrities and great actors? Well, of course, they throw up their hands and exclaim, “she’s not awkward or unattractive at all. What more need be said?”
No! If they did that, it wouldn’t be patriarchy!
Instead, men visit on her disturbing and oppressive sexual attention.
Jodie Foster, who acted opposite Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro at 13, was stalked by John Hinckley, who later shot a President to impress her.
Brooke Shields was both filmed and still photographed topless before she turned 13. (If I recall correctly, the photos, which may well be child porn under the current US law, remain in the hands of a private “collector” who refuses to give them back to her, though she has offered to buy them.)
Natalie Portman had a whole pedophile following after The Professional and Beautiful Girls, one she finally lived down; as she said in 2004, “but I’m so fully legal now that pedophiles are over me. I’m like a frickin’ hag to the pedophile set.”
There were internet countdowns to the eighteenth birthdays of the Olsen Twins and young feminist Emma Watson (who played Hermione Granger beginning at age 10 in the Harry Potter films).
There’s a story in how each of these women has reacted to mass sexual attention at an early age; but that’s not the point of the post. Some have been more or less destroyed, some seem to have beaten it, though I suspect the scars still show. I could tell anecdotes about friends sexualized early, who have struggled ever after. We all have a story like that, I suspect, or several. Which tells us a lot.
So there it is: ugly and worthless, or live bait/freak magnet. Those are the choices patriarchy offers to our girls. Picking on young girls for being awkward is cruel; so is sexualizing them. Men should just leave them alone until they’re grown up. But apparently that’s too much to ask.