The Minnesota State High School League has banned “mid-riff baring” cheerleading uniforms, and I feel conflicted–and not because I’m a pervert. This is one of those touchy issues where I see both sides of the arguent. Despite the “we’re all in this together” vibe of the announcement, I am pretty confident that any official, affirmative word from the cheerleaders themselves was strictly of the brown-nosing, secretly-rolling-the-eyes, “aren’t-adults-clueless” variety. Kids, especially teenagers, want nothing as painfully as they want to be grown up.
Yesterday, I drove my 10-year-old daughter to her first day of school. At 10, children go through a sort of rebellious, proto-teenage patch which is itself interesting and a clear harbinger of things to come. Anyway, Sylvia was pointing out some of the high school kids as we pulled into the parking lot, and taking note of their crazy costumes–mostly of the leather and dye and spikes variety. A couple of them were smoking cigarettes. “Why do you think they like to do that–dress funny and smoke?” I asked Sylvie–who is firmly against cigarettes. “Because they want someone to notice them,” she said. And I thought that may be one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard anyone say.
Anyway, there is a large contingent of parents these days who dismissively say “Let kids be kids” as a way to excuse their indifference to what their children might choose to wear or do. (Having been exposed to enough present-day high school students, especially by way of a friend who teaches Spanish, I can tell you how effective dress codes actually are in the halls of your average public high school. Not.) But this is precisely the point–they are not being children, they are mimicking adults. If their parents were more engaged in sheltering them from the adult world, in limiting their exposure to hyper-sexualized, ultra-violent, instant-gratification pop culture they might find that kids uncorrupted by these enticements actually do want to be kids. As I frequently tell my own children, you’ll spend the vast majority of your life as an adult. Enjoy being a kid while you still can.
There is an ironic, media-world corollary of this–a growing conservatism in certain sectors of publishing, especially newspapers. I suppose it is sort of a counter-balance to MTV and Comedy Central and HBO (I happened to see “Rome” the other day, and I liked it quite a bit, but was a little surprised to see so many soft-core depictions of rough sex during prime-time) when newspaper editors fret about publishing photos of the dead in New Orleans, for example. I have been told by several newspaper editors, including one at the New York Times, that they have to be sensitive to the fact that the newspaper lands on the family breakfast table every morning. “What do you say to the frightened, weeping child who sees A-1 laying there in front of daddy?” Well, lkike I say, I appreciate the impulse to protect chidlren from the adult world, but in this case I would gently suggest that daddy keep the New York Times in his briefcase until he gets to work. Let the adult world and the childish world be separate domains.
But for god’s sake, let those cheerleaders still wear mini-skirts.
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