Think of your teen daughter. Imagine you are her, for just a day.
You get out of bed, put your iPod on shuffle and listen to lyrics that, well, they are so degrading to girls I can’t write them. On the ride to school, you pass billboards showing beautiful, thin girls selling products or being the object of a man’s attention and wonder if you need to lose a few pounds or be sexier. At school, your girlfriends gossip in graphic details about their sexual encounters over the weekend and you worry that you haven’t had sex with enough guys yet. At home you turn on the TV and watch guys paw scantily clad girls in music videos. You worry that maybe you are not pretty enough for a man to want to have sex with you. You log onto MySpace and are greeted with comments from girls at school telling you that you are “ugly and should die.” You get instant messages from guys you hardly know asking if you will give them head or screw them. A friend sends you a link to a free porn site he is watching and you curiously click on it. You watch two men slap, spank, spit on, and insert themselves into every orifice of the girl who sounds like she is enjoying it, but you aren’t quite sure. Should you be letting your boyfriend do those things to you? Is that lovemaking? Before you go to sleep, you thumb through the latest magazine and read about the ten top things guys wish you knew how to do in bed and wonder if you your guy will leave you if you don’t. Your cell beeps: a text message from your best friend who just found out she is pregnant. You can’t drive her to the clinic. She is now furious with you.
How are you feeling right about now? If you are like most teen girls, you are confused, overwhelmed, scared, and lack self-confidence or self-respect. Who wouldn’t feel those things?
How did our world get so crazy for teens? Garbage. Not the kind filling our landfills, but rather the kind that fills our hearts and minds. We have come to use the garbage of sex and violence to get people to buy things or to “buy into” things. We’ve lost our moral compass as well as the map to human kindness, empathy, and compassion. The world is in an economic crisis as well as a human crisis. But, there is a way to clean up the mess. It just takes three small words: honor the girl.
Right now we are focused on saving Mother Earth and turning around our economic woes. Global warming, sustainability, economy, are all buzz words of the day. But we are ahead of ourselves. To save Mother Earth, we start by saving the MOTHERS of the earth. Girls have power. Power that no man can match, yet we haven’t tapped into it. In fact, we’ve corrupted it.
Girls can do the one thing that men cannot. Women can have babies. Today’s teen girls today are the mother’s of the future. What we teach our teen girls today are the lessons we will deal with tomorrow. At the moment, the lesson teen girls are learning is that to be valued, to be loved, you must be, and I apologize, I know of no other word to use, F*@k-able. What types of mothers are we creating when the F-word is what we honor? Why aren’t we honoring the L-word. Life? And the R-word, Respect?
Helping teen girls respect themselves will help heal our world’s woes, because women are the healers. We are the nurturers. Let us relish in our feminine energy for what it is, life bearing, as opposed to corrupting it to be simply a source of gratification for a man’s needs. Life. What better ideal to honor? Teach girls to respect themselves and you teach them how to help the next generation respect themselves and others. And so it will go. When people respect themselves, they are less prone to behavior that is destructive to others or self. That creates calm communities that have more resources for solving big issues like economic woes, or finding solutions to helping the planet thrive. Honor the girl. Help Mother Earth by honoring her girls that might one day grow up to be mothers. Think what could happen if every mother taught their children that you don’t kill another mother’s child. Perhaps the next generation will look for peaceful solutions instead of waging war. The wonderful possibilities of where we go as human beings depend on whether or not we learn to “Honor the girl.” It’s that simple.
