There Is No Vacation From Exploitation Of Our Girls

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, summer was a glorious season. Summer meant freedom. Innocence. Artlessness. Languid in the heat, sand wedged between our toes, long hair lank with Coppertone, dressed in frayed cutoffs and simple T-shirts, armed with only lip gloss and maybe some black mascara, young women like me prowled coastal Atlantic towns, sleepy summer resorts that wake for three months of the year after a nine-month slumber. Summer gave us permission to cut loose, like children released on the last day of school. Summer promised sun, sand, sparkling water. Summer offered sensuality of a safe, playful sort. Boy watching and beer drinking, Chad and Jeremy singing “A Summer Song.” Potential summer romance. Back then, thongs meant a type of sandal, not a bikini bottom.

Summer has come again. I prowl the very same Main Street of a once sleepy resort town on the east end of Long Island with my 11-year-old daughter. She wants to shop. The street used to be lined with stores selling elegant housewares, antiques, classic clothing, funky crafts. A few survive. Most have been driven out, dispossessed, by an increasing number of trend-driven retail outlets.

And what a trend in summer clothing. We eye window display after window display. Tops are cropped. They will barely cover breasts, no matter the size or shape. Skirts stop at the crotch. Dresses are spaghetti-strapped and low cut, so narrow, so tiny they appear to be made from less than a yard of fabric. And what fabrics. Spandex. Stretchy black or white lace. Filmy, see-through synthetics. A lingerie look of being undressed for the street. No frayed cutoffs or simple, loose tees. No playful sensuality and certainly no romance.

If anything, they are even skimpier once you pull them off a rack and handle them. They are the stuff of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Except for a handful of females whose genes have given them small-boned, skinny bodies, no one can wear these clothes without the constant obsessional behavior of starvation and exercise, starvation and exercise. Or, binge and vomit, binge and vomit.

My daughter holds up a shirt. “That’s three months of bulimia,” I tell her. “You interested?” She shakes her head no and puts it back. But there is lingering regret. After all, this is what she sees, what is marketed. This is what she is told she should wear, and by connection, what she should look like.

Every store is the same. At one, my daughter holds up another shirt. “Would you like to try that on?” asks a muscled young salesboy, with a leering grin. I intervene. “No, she wouldn’t.” My voice is acid. “She’s a child. These clothes invite rape.”

“I own this store. I’m insulted. These are beautiful clothes.” I turn to see a middle-aged woman glaring at me. In hard-edged voice she tells me, “Look at this. This is a gorgeous dress.” She pulls out yet another spaghetti-strapped, low-cut, narrow dress. The only things in its favor are the knee length and that I know a handful of 8-year-olds who could squeeze into it.

“It is the dress of a rape victim,” I tell her calmly. “If the girl wearing it is assaulted, presses charges and goes to trial, she will be told she asked for it. That dress - or what’s left of it - will be held up to a jury and used against her in a court of law.”

We leave. I brace myself for a tirade from my daughter about how I have humiliated her in public. No tirade is forthcoming. Instead, I see her thoughtful, considering. I view that as a hopeful sign.

I don’t want to have these conversations in front of my 11-year-old daughter. She’s entitled to a childhood. Pornography wasn’t in my lexicon, rape barely understood, when I was her age. But I have no choice now. She has no choice, either. Rape is her culture. It is everywhere she looks. It’s in the TV she watches, the movies, magazines, ads, fashions. I fear it’s in the marrow of her bones.

If summer meant cutting loose and recapturing innocence to me, if it meant dressing down and dispensing with the makeup and clothes that preoccupied me during the rest of the year, it has become an entirely different annual rite of passage to my daughter, to all the other daughters slowly coming of age in America.

For them, summer has become a season of graphic, merciless body exposure. This exposure leaves them open to constant cruel judgments by boys and men, by other girls and women. It threatens their physical safety and emotional health. They are utterly vulnerable.

Our stroll down Main Street is about a loss of innocence so profound, so appalling, that I wonder why I am not reeling down the block. Everywhere I turn, mainstream, institutionalized, culturally sanctioned pornography slaps me and my child in our faces. It is demeaning, vicious and terrorizing. It has nothing to do with love, sex, desire or intimacy. It has nothing to do with celebration of the female body. It’s about nothing more than naked - literally and figuratively - power. The power of dressed males over undressed, powerless females.

There is nothing to buy. We leave, driving across the drawbridge to the barrier reef stretching miles along the Atlantic that our family has called home for 22 summers. Like Main Street, it once was sleepy, quiet and a little funky. What was offered was timeless. Beach, ocean and the extraordinary Edward Hopper light. Dunes, scrub pines, bays and wetlands, egrets and pheasants, fishing and clamming.

Now, the ocean disgorges garbage on the beaches, the bay is filled with Jet Skis and the ratcheting clamor of cigarette boats. Egrets and pheasants hide, and there are no clams to be dug. I suddenly realize I am watching our natural resources depleted in much the same way I am witnessing another precious natural resource, our daughters, slowly polluted and perhaps destroyed.

This summer, only the extraordinary light remains pure and unsullied.

xxxx