Pull Your Pants Up, Girl.

A few weeks ago I traveled with my boyfriend to visit his nephew at a Penn State frat house. His nephew, a lovely boy with an awkward/cool shy-guy persona, welcomed us warmly and invited us to the party that was to ensue later that night. We accepted the invitation. Around midnight girls and boys started pouring into the house already in various states of inebriation. I was shocked, at first, at how young they looked. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a book-toting college student as well, behaving in the ways only college students do. Yet it occurred to me more than once that these students were children, and should be required to have a chaperon present. What an old lady I’ve become, I thought. I leaned against the wall with a warming beer in my hand observing the general haphazardness to the underdeveloped debauchery the students were trying to cultivate through loud music and tight clothing and copious amounts of cheap liquor. I didn’t care for the energy in the place. This had never been my scene. Most disturbing, on a list of concerning details, were the girls, and the very specific way they were asking for attention.

In the darkened room that served as the dance floor, girls in skirts that were too short, heels that were too high and pants that were slung way too low shook their asses (and other parts) to the beat of popular hip-hop. These white, Midwestern girls were mimicking rap video dances, and were not executing the moves with any particular talent. They pressed their hips, grinding and swerving, onto each other for the attention of the boys. They bent over and flung their hair and touched their bodies suggestively. They paraded around the place in strings of six and seven and eight, all holding hands, moving purposely from dance floor to bar to bathroom, shaking unsteadily on their ambitiously high heels. Their main concern was attention, and this was an entirely different breed of attention-grabbing than I was used to. In more than one case that evening, it was the most attractive girls who seemed to do the most posturing. It was the girls with the enviably petite, tan and toned figures, and the most perfectly bleached and highlighted hair that were dancing the dirtiest and grinding the hardest. Their eyes shot frenetically around to see who was looking at them. They were the ones to grab their friend’s hands demandingly and lead them in a group to the next stop on the frat-party circuit. Their desire for acceptance, it came from some very deep rooted place. These girls made me nervous for their personal safety. Their personal emotional and physical safety.

I was a hippie in college, more apt to wear my curtains than some too-tight, too-low jeans. Not to mention, they don’t make jeans like that in my size. At least they didn’t a few years ago. I danced to hip-hop, but I did it in abandoned warehouses with skateboard punks and homeless train-hopping travelers. My version of the bump-and-grind dance was to participate in an educated discourse on the Middle East conflict or have the most tersely worded slogan on my artistically rendered poster at a political rally. My priorities were different, my venues were different, but my desperate need for attention and affection was the same.

There’s an equation as simple as one plus one. Girls who are raised with a sense of self worth are not blindly, self-deprecatingly promiscuous. They do better in school. They are more successful in life. Period. Instilling a sense of self worth is a tall order for any parent of adolescents, and I have to wonder where these particular girls' parents went wrong.