SLUTS

A couple of guys sitting with me at the trading desk posed a question the other day: are girls sluttier today than they were ten to twenty years ago? Duh. They obviously hadn't watched MTV, VH1 or BET lately. The sluts on those channels aren't just naughty, they're nasty; you can't help but imagine that their privates are petrie dishes teeming with all sorts of STD's. Reality shows and talk-gawk shows like Jerry Springer revel in today's Slut Cult. "I'm just seventeen years old, Jerry, and I'm not a bit ashamed of having a threesome with my step daddy and that guy what's-his-name who lives in the next trailer over." Every prime time sitcom has a teenage chick who would make Lolita blush. I bet even wholesome Miley Cyrus is under pressure to get a pair of fake tits and to start showing some skin now that she's at the ripe age of sixteen. Our present day culture gives the impression that if you are a sixteen year old dude and you're not at least getting regular bj's from your girlfriend, then you must be getting them from your boyfriend.

Have you been to the mall on a Saturday afternoon? It's a passing parade of bare midriffs showing some tacky navel jewelry, and jeans so tight and low that you can see the girl's thong and ass crack. And the tattoos. I don't get the tattoos that I see young women adorn themselves with today. When I was a youngster, sluts wouldn't have countenanced the thought of putting a tramp stamp across their lower back. The only people who had tattoos back then were sailors, bikers and carnival freaks.

So why are girls sluttier today? I suppose the easiest answer is that this is all just a natural consequence of the 1960's Sexual Revolution. Of course, the hippies back then never imagined themselves having children, so it was easy to espouse "If it feels good, then do it" as a moral code. I know a few former hippies who are now middle-aged parents and I love to watch them cringe when somebody mentions how blow jobs parties are the big thing among middle schoolers nowadays. Reap what you sow, man. Blow jobs do feel good, right? Then why shouldn't kids do it?

The Age of Feminism also did a lot to encourage women to at least display as much horniness as men, even if they weren't as horny. Thanks to the Women's Lib credo that women have as much right as men to behave badly, you can draw a straight line from Gloria Steinham to Brittany Spears, a straight line on a decidedly declining angle. The message, everywhere and all the time, is "You go, girl. Hooking up is fun to do!" (For those of you not in-the-know, "hooking up" is a euphemism for casual, no holds barred, no questions asked sex.) It gets even more flagrant in college with condom machines and co-ed bathrooms in the dorms; college administrators are going out of their way to tempt their students to get it on.

The irony is that Feminism would seem to argue against women being sexual objects. Wasn't that one of the original guiding principles behind the movement? I guess these later libbers like to think that women should be as sexually aggressive as men, be an equal partner. But let's be honest here, ladies, excuse me, women (the term "lady" is a relic from a patriarchal past), the sexual act itself is inherently one that presupposes dominant and passive roles, a subject and an object. One person is entering while the other is being entered. There's the penetrator and the penetratee; the screwdriver and the hole that the screw is being screwed into. We can tweak the rules of the game a bit, like who's on top, but it's still a matter of who's pitching and who's catching. The pitcher is always the dominant player.

Bill Clinton also helped to slutify the zietgeist. His revolutionary claim that getting a blow job from a nineteen year old intern did not constitute a sexual act gave the green light to teenage girls across the nation that "giving a Lewinsky" was ok, even kind of cool. Teenage boys everywhere owe a great debt to their President for that contribution to the onward march of youthful lasciviousness.

Ah, to be a teenage boy in this day and age. I'll admit that when I was that age all I thought about was "getting some action." As Meatloaf sang about in Paradise by the Dashboard Lights, rounding the bases was the goal every guy had in high school. Doesn't "getting on base" sound quaint nowadays? Getting a hand underneath a bra, or getting on second base, seemed about as hard as getting a double off Roger Clemens. Nowadays it seems like all the young dudes hit a grand slam every time they get at bat. I kept my virginity up to the 12th grade when I lost it at some Halloween party to a lady ten years older than me at one of those "adults only" apartment complexes that were the fad back in the seventies. I stayed a virgin up until then but it sure wasn't from lack of trying to lose it every which way I could.

And think of the porn that kids today have access to. The Internet offers a full menu of free porn and the only hurdle that a teenager has to get over is the pop up question asking the user to certify that he or she is at least 18 years or older before entering the site. What a difficult moral conundrum this must present to Johnny Hardon. When I was in middle school the only stimulus I had to get off on were the bra advertisements in the newspaper. Later on, I'd pop a woody at the scent of a newly purchase magazine because it reminded me of the newly purchased Playboy that my older brother always managed to procure each month.

I have a nine year old daughter and I have already prepared the speech that I plan on giving her when she gets to middle school. "Sweetie, believe it or not, I was once a 13 year old boy. And there was only one thing I thought about and that was taking advantage of a sweet, innocent girl like you. Not that that's necessarily bad, that's just the way boys are. You know those nice porter house steaks that I grill every Sunday evening for dinner? Well, that's how those boys are going to be looking at you, like nice thick steak to be devoured. Now, you don't want to be devoured like a piece of meat, do you, sweetie?"

I'm hoping the answer she gives me is, No. But nowadays, God help me, you never know...