Sometimes I have The Today Show on while I unload and reload the dishwasher in the morning, and in this way I stay abreast of critical happenings in the world, such as the fact that Israel and Palestine are in the middle of their worst military conflict in years, and that Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams were fighting during the filming of The Notebook. The Today Show has concerts on the plaza on Fridays in the summer, and once in a while there is a performer who actually makes me turn the sink off and listen for a minute. Billy Joel was on there once, reminding me of my youth and my own mortality but still managing to bring depth and a new vulnerability to his music, and Sara Bareilles was on there once, awing me with her vocal versatility and soul.
Today, the concert on the plaza featured a girl band called “Fifth Harmony,” whom I only know about because I have a fourteen-year-old daughter. Fortunately, she doesn’t like them, and fortunately, she shares everything with me (or as much as a mother can reasonably hope for), so I was already aware of this group and had some data points: they are pitchy, both individually and as a group, and their skirts are too short. But I had never given them much thought or seen them perform until this morning.
If you have never seen Fifth Harmony and can’t get a visual image of what they looked like on The Plaza, imagine going to the red light district of a major city and bringing home five of the youngest-yet-cheapest prostitutes you can find, dressing them all in white but in garments that show as much skin or underwear as possible, and then having them dance with Brittany Spears inspired choreography, but sexier, while singing lyrics such as
You say that you a baller an’ I see you tryna holla
But that ain’t how I was brought up: NEXT!
Working for my money cuz that’s what my momma taught me
So yo ass betta show me some respect
I had to Google that because I couldn’t actually tell what they were saying, but the crowd on the plaza mouthing the words obviously did. That crowd was mostly little white girls of various ages, with their moms and friends and au pairs and boyfriends. The crowd loved these girls, and even worse, the Today Show cast (is it a cast on a show like that, where they are playing themselves but surely acting?) seemed to love them, too, wearing necklaces that featured the name of the group’s new single (“Boss,” wouldn’tcha know), and in the case of Savannah Guthrie, genuinely gushing. Part of Savannah’s charm is that she gushes at everything, would probably gush at Stalin if she met him, but still. She said that the group’s message is “be confident, be strong, be yourself,” and the Fifth Harmony Wikipedia page quotes the singers as saying their music is “fun, positive, and inspiring,” plus “relatable” and “what teenage girls want to hear and say.”
So I’m just trying to reconcile “positive” and “inspiring” and “be yourself” with the hookers-on-speed look and sound I saw on that stage on my tiny kitchen T.V. Because, truly, I’m not exaggerating, their main dance moves were spreading their legs wide and pumping their pelvises, both facing the crowd and facing their butts to the crowd, squishing their breasts between their upper arms and thrusting them to the music at the audience, and what I will call the “watch my Kegal exercise” move. These Disney-Radio girls are all about sex, being sexy, thrusting their sexuality at people and showing off their bodies. (Though I will say, several of them are kinda chunky and sporting teeny-tiny clothes. anyway, so I guess there’s some in-your-face confidence there, I’ll give them that.) All the while, they are singing lyrics such as “I was such a good girl, so fragile, but no more…my innocence is wearing thin but my heart is growing strong,” they are tousling their hair, pouting their lips and affixing a vacant, come-hither look in their eyes, while having air-sex in time to the music. That’s being positive and inspiring? That’s how they hope to send the message be yourself?
I guess it is. I guess it really is, because thanks to feminism and the pill and the media and television and movies and a general turning our back on things like manners and decorum, our culture values sexual freedom more than anything else. We bow at the altars of health, fitness, some lazy notion of “peace” that involves doing nothing and hoping it all works out, “being yourself” and sexual freedom, especially if you are female. Premarital everything is so normal now that my daughters’ pediatrician said to make sure I got them the Gardisil shot before their “sexual debut,” so best to do it before thirteen. Dubut! Thirteen! (Getting a new pediatrician.)
The dirty little secret here, or maybe it’s no secret, is that promiscuity is the one thing that hurts young women more than anything else. Even when it doesn’t result in pregnancy and all the social and emotional baggage that accompanies that, promiscuity causes low self-esteem, lower grades in school, and emotional problems; any counselor knows that. It rips and tears at the fabric of society and the soul of individual girls, and then we tell them Be Yourself! Be confident! Be positive! And then we (and by we I mean Savannah Guthrie on behalf of The Today Show) praise groups like Fifth Harmony, who say they are positive and inspiring for girls and assert the occasional lyric that relates to being “strong.” But any parent will tell you that our example is not in what we say but what we do. Any teacher or psychologist or pastor or public figure will agree that the best way to influence young people is not with words but with how we live our lives. Our actions. This girl band and all the Katie Perrys and Bionces in the world do not set an example by their lyrics, even if every girl in the free world knows them by heart. They set an example by their clothes and dancing and how they comport themselves. It doesn’t matter what they are saying, their message is clearly sexsexsexsexsexsex… It isn’t strong, it is weak and beneath the dignity of girls and women. But somehow, our culture thinks this is okay. They’re being themselves! They’re strong! Yay girls!
So my own daughters, who don’t read my blog and don’t tend to like this kind of music anyway, will not be listening to Fifth Harmony, and I wish there was a vaccine that protected other little girls from this kind of music. And I won’t be one of those moms who wants to be cool and fun and goes to concerts with their girls and mouths the lyrics and says woo-hoo in-between songs. I will have to really be counter-cultural and tell them that a real lady doesn’t have to dance like that. That a girl who is really confident isn’t bossy and tacky and aggressively sexual. That having your “innocence wear thin” as a pre-teen or teenager isn’t a good thing, even if you get stronger, like scar tissue. (Which by the way sometimes aches for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter if you are strong.) That you don’t get respect by acting like that, you get it by being kind and fair and discreet, by not gossiping, by surviving hardship with grace and having a good sense of humor. In fact, stay the heck away from any boy from whom you have to demand respect; you should command it by your strength of character. That it is possible to really be ‘yourself’ and also wears skirts that go to your knee and shirts that don’t show your bra. And that “fun” doesn’t mean trashy or vulgar–that trashy and vulgar do still exist, even if we don’t call them that. Even if we put them on a stage and praise them for their message. I will tell them skanky is skanky and I hope they tell their daughters–God only knows what they’ll see on The Plaza– that the Emperor and the girl band aren’t wearing any clothes.
