My observations come from a hell of a lot more data than a small group of teenage girls in an ice-cream shop...although I guarantee they aren't any different than any number of girls their age I could find in just about any high school or church youth group anywhere in the land.

True story time:

A daddy's girl gets the cops called on her at a college dorm because she's always walking around naked in the halls, and paying visits to gentlemen suitors on different floors. When the officers arrive and confront this girl, she's in a stairwell completely naked...and one of the officers cannot help but notice that there are mardi-gras beads hanging out of her lady business. She was oblivious to that fact at the time, of course. Daddy is a cop. They call daddy and daddy looses his shit...not at his daughter, but at the officers who called him for lying about his daughter. Threatens a lawsuit. Threatens to call every superior he can think of short of the POTUS to have all their jobs.

Also in police possession at the time was video of this girl getting double teamed and taking the finisher to the face from two dudes she didn't really even know...and she took it like a pro. It wasn't surprising that she knew how to handle that bit given the research she'd been doing on the internet.

Daddy didn't want to acknowledge the fact that his little girl wasn't a little girl anymore. Being a teenager, she knew how to play different roles in different situations to convince the group in front of her of whatever she wanted to convince them of. Daddy's little girl act with daddy which kept him happy, honor student act which kept her in good stead with her professors and, of course, with daddy...and the full on Bree Olsen/Bobbi Starr act with two random dudes for hedonism, male attention, approval, or whatever motivation she had for engaging in such an act.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, here, but kids today are on average more worldly at 13 than I was at 17. They can describe...in startling detail...sex acts I didn't even know existed until I heard stories from dudes who were stationed in the Philippines. Doubt the description of the act? They can google that shit and have a video of it playing for you before you can say "slouching towards Gamorrah". When I was a kid the idea of taking pictures or video of your girlfriend in various states of undress/coitus was something even the class sluts wouldn't go near...now? Now the number of dudes who are walking around with video of girls giving them head on their cell phone is fucking staggering.

Now is this a desirable situation for the human race? I certainly don't think so....but I'm not the one causing it. So save your ire for a worthy target rather than coming off uber-offended at the guy who is just telling you like it is.

You have daughters? Congratulations...but know this: If they're over the age of 11, I can state with relative certainty that they aren't telling you everything. And they never will anymore than you told your parents everything. It would certainly be comforting to think that the girls who took those pictures at the slumber party I mentioned were "bad" kids raised by morons, but that's just not the case. They were by all available measures good kids. Good students. No serious behavior problems. Did charity work. Good work ethic. Parents were salt-of-the-earth types who had sense and tried really hard to raise them right. They still took naked pictures and snuck in beer and got drunk and did stupid shit that worked its way around the school  at the speed of Facebook and 3g. The natural thing to do is yell "SLUTS!!!!" and by doing so pretend that they were somehow defective and that it could never happen to your kids. It's a comforting fiction, but comforting fictions don't produce results.

That's the thing about kids: They do stupid shit. They have a short attention span and the teenage brain sucks at understanding the long term effects of actions taken right now. Teenagers don't understand that life is chess, not checkers, and that stupid shit has life altering consequences. They live in a world where 30 is like, unbelievably old and junk. There is no amount of parenting that can ensure that another human with piss-poor judgment will always do the smart thing.

The whole premise of the thread is hilarious. A dude who owns an ice cream shop that employs exclusively attractive teenage girls getting perturbed that pervs are looking "that way" at his employees. Hint: The practice of having attractive teenage girls at ice cream shops isn't exactly an unusual tactic because it's great for business. If everybody was an upstanding puritan type like me who didn't eye fuck 16 year old girls even if they are dressed in skirts so short they are tugging at the hem every 7 seconds so the world can't see whether or not the cuffs and collars match, he wouldn't make as much money. Ditto if he replaced his staff with fat hairy dudes.

Now this is America and it's a reasonably free country and he's not the first to use a bit of titillation to make some money...but it's hilarious that he's worked up about the strategy working a little too well in some cases.

...but I'm not too worked up about the girls in this situation because I've been in the unique position of peeking behind the green door and looking at aspects of their lives that they usually keep neatly segmented away from authority figures. They're human. Human beings are absolutely marvelous at compartmentalizing their lives to play completely different roles when necessary. Nazis would spend several hours a day shooting unarmed jews in the back of the head with 8mm Mausers...including women and children...and would go back home to their families and still be dad and husband and all that rot. Bob the accountant goes to church and loves his wife and kids and is a pillar of the community, at least until he's caught in a public park restroom servicing random men at a glory hole. Etc. As a species it's probably one of our greatest talents. At times a necessary survival mechanism...but more often a way for us to try and fill whatever base impulses we have without unpleasant consequences that sometimes accompany those acts.

The girls are not the innocent damsels we'd like to think they are. I'd love nothing more than to look at a pretty 16 year old girl in an ice cream shop and think of her as a sweet, virginial kid who is going to do well in school, marry a really nice fella, and live happily ever after. I'd love to think that...and you know what? She can tell....and she'll play that role. Even if I happen to have seen the pictures from a slumber party that prove otherwise.

Welcome to humanity.

Guess who's really living in the basement, chief.

Thankfully we have people who like to type around here.





 

The benefit of being a borderline loon who is prone to rants is that you never really consider how many words you're using.



Dear Penthouse,

I never thought it would happen to me...

I would modify that somewhat and say that keeping them from as many stupidly dangerous situations as possible is a good idea, as well. As a parent understand that they are going to screw up...so provide some form of structure around them that lets them screw up in ways that hopefully don't fuck up their life from that point on. Think of it like those inflatable pontoons you use when you are teaching kids to bowl.

When I taught teenagers in Sunday School class I spent copious amounts of time talking about making important decisions in life and how little decisions made today had a snowball effect of being really big decisions just a few years down the road. I talked to them like adults and used real life examples from the lives of other people I know (or my own, in some circumstances) to try and help them understand the dangers. Even then it doesn't always work. One of the students I was most fond of went off to college for a year and a half and then one Sunday I noticed her with a dude in tow talking about wanting to get married...and unconsciously rubbing her belly. Smart kid. Straight A student. Raised by great parents. Her mother is a saint, humble and wise.

She just really wanted to have sex...to the point of flirting with me at one point. When that happened I knew how the movie was going to end. She's married with two kids now, though...so she's managed to do OK so far.

Girls have hormones, too. And done properly sex can feel really good for them, too. And they can view it like a recreational activity, too.

I stare back.

The Rapunzel approach rarely works, in my experience. It just encourages the girl to put on the mask and dance to the tune that's being fiddled largely for the comfort of her parents. Then eventually she goes to college and goes on a hedonistic bender of legend. I dined in a group setting with a young lady about to graduate who 1/2 way through her freshman year went, according to her description, "completely insane" and "fucked anything that moved" for the next couple of years or so. Her parents have no idea, of course...Rapunzel syndrome.

Some "relationships" have more in common with combat than they do with what we understand as "romance". It's not so much about sharing as it is about taking or stopping somebody else from taking from you. The predatory nature of sexcapades involving frat "brothers" who work girls to get them to a party, get them hammered almost to the point of unconsciousness, and then run a train on them would be an example. That's not really a relationship...it's predation.