or the problem of being sexy but not sexual and the sexualization of tweens.

Interesting reading for women I think.

I've often quoted Courtney Martin's now-famous line from her Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: We are the daughters of feminists who said, "You can be anything" and we heard "You have to be everything."

I call it the Martha Complex, others call it the Supergirl syndrome; whatever name you give it, most of us who work with young people agree that it's absolutely rampant among contemporary girls and young women (even those whose mothers weren't feminists!) The complex has many sources, but one factor that particularly exacerbates the problem is sexualization.

Ariel Levy, in her powerful and controversial Female Chauvinist Pigs, quoted Paris Hilton's remarkably perceptive remark about herself that she was "sexy, but not sexual." Hilton isn't alone. My students today, who are mostly in their late teens (though I have many older ones as well) were deeply influenced by Hilton, who was at the peak of her notoriety four or five years ago, when these now-college freshman were just entering high school. And sadly, not unlike many of their older sisters, they find themselves stuck in what we might call the "Paris Paradox."

Young women with the Paris Paradox were raised in a culture that promised sexual freedom, but what they ended up with looked a lot more like obligation than opportunity. It's not hard to understand why the pressure to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to discover one's authentic sexuality. As Levy and Martin and others have been pointing out for the past decade, we've begun to sexualize girls at ever earlier ages, as anyone who noticed the Halloween costumes marketed to tween girls will be aware. The explicitness — the raunchiness, to use Levy's word — of this sexualization is relatively new. But when that sexualization (or pornification, to use another popular term) meets the far-older pressure on young women to be people-pleasers, we have a recipe for misery.

Read more: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2010/11/09/the-paris-paradox-how-sexualization-replaces-opportunity-with-obligation/#ixzz153GIO3v1

I was always impressed that someone who stood to inherit gazillions of dollars actually had a job.