Why do we let our daughters dress like prostitutes? (Jennifer Moses)

Good question! Though I don't have daughters (yet) it's one I've wondered about myself. Walking through the mall or our local college campus (Christian btw) I'm struck by the similarity of female attire to what one sees on the women plying their trade on Broadway a few blocks from where I live. Short shorts, miniskirts and plunging necklines have become elements of the standard kit. Maybe I'm turning into a middle-aged curmudgeon, but the trend leaves me frequently muttering to myself, "you gotta be kidding."

Author and mom Jennifer Moses writes on this in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?

I posed this question to a friend whose teenage daughter goes to an all-girls private school in New York. "It isn't that different from when we were kids," she said. "The girls in the sexy clothes are the fast girls. They'll have Facebook pictures of themselves opening a bottle of Champagne, like Paris Hilton. And sometimes the moms and dads are out there contributing to it, shopping with them, throwing them parties at clubs. It's almost like they're saying, 'Look how hot my daughter is.'" But why? "I think it's a bonding thing," she said. "It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there."

I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"

We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up. We were also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find our true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls now drowning in regret—I know women of my generation who waited until marriage—but that's certainly the norm among my peers.

So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.

Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don't know one of them who doesn't have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I've ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she'd "experimented" more.

This self-confessed "New Millenium Mom" concludes. . .

We wouldn't dream of dropping our daughters off at college and saying: "Study hard and floss every night, honey—and for heaven's sake, get laid!" But that's essentially what we're saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they're still living under our own roofs.

This is an excellent and honest piece. Read the whole thing. Though I agree with a point made by Justin Taylor -- which is that the missing element in her analysis is the role of men and dads in all of this. Lord knows I'm not a neo-Victorian, but seems to me the spiritual, emotional and aesthetic health of our society demands the "push-back" called for by Moses.