Grumpy Conservative or Progressive Feminist--You Make the Call!

My daughter has been given an assignment in her physical education class (7th grade) that involves working out something called a "jump routine" with three other girls. A jump routine seems to be something like a cheerleading routine for people who don't like the connotations associated with the word "cheerleading". There is a very complicated set of scoring criteria. I can't remember how many categories of 1-10 point grades are to be awarded for this two minute drill, but they filled an entire page and gave me the impression that visitors from the Olympic Selection Committee will be secreted away in the audience somewhere. The girls must choose some music and work out the choreography of the routine as a group, and they will perform it in front of their class and their teacher.

"Choose some music". Seems benign enough, you say to yourself. I will be the first to admit that I have been a lazy, though not, I think, negligent, father in this case, because I did not know anything about this assignment until my daughter asked me to burn a CD for her with her group's dance music on it. That was when I first discovered that the tune to which they would be jumping around and giggling is Jason Derulo's "Talk Dirty to Me". Although the title did not inspire much confidence in me, I have already downloaded enough music for her on iTunes to know that titles often--if not usually, these days--bear little or no relation to the actual content of the song. If it can really be said that songs these days have any content. But some spark of Divine Illumination prompted me to check out the lyrics to this song before burning the CD. So I went to the website A-Z Lyrics, and after reading through the words to the song it was not surprising to me when I finally noticed that the way they were laid out on the screen made them look like a large erect phallus, because the song is mostly about phalluses. Erect phalluses. Erect phalluses being used in a variety of different ways, but mostly ways that are not really appropriate for 12 and 13 year old girls to be dancing to. Here is a sample of some of the lyrics:

Dos Cadenas, closed the genius
Sold out arenas, you can suck my penis
Gilbert Arenas, guns on deck
Chest to chest, tongue on neck
International oral sex
Every picture I take, I pose a threat
Boat or jet, what do you expect?
Her pussy so good I bought her a pet
Anyway, every day I'm trying to get to it
Got her saved in my phone under "Big Booty"

And so on, and so forth. When I asked my daughter what she liked about this song, she said "It's catchy, and I like the chorus." I wasn't really sure what the "chorus" of this song was supposed to be--there is a section where he says "Talk dirty to me" over and over again (hence the title, I suppose), but it didn't really stand out very much, and even if it did, well there's a song called "Hey Jude", but not one called "Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah".

So to make this short story even longer, I told my daughter that she could not use this song, and she complained that it is a group project and the choice is not up to her. "And besides", she pointed out, "The teacher approved it already."

What?

The teacher approved it?

I confess that my visage betrayed, somewhat, my skeptical attitude.

"Don't lie to me with that mouth," I said.

"She did, and anyway we have to do it on Thursday. It's all decided!"

I found it inconceivable that any teacher would approve this song for use in the classroom, so I decided to write to the teacher myself and let her know how I felt about the piece. In my email to her I pointed out that my daughter had told me that the song had been approved by a teacher, and that I thought this could only mean that the teacher had not noticed the lyrics, so I reproduced for her the ones you can read above. I then ranted for a while about the image this presents of women and young girls serving as mere instruments of male pleasure and that I did not think it salutary to have the public schools turn a blind eye to the degradation and objectification of women. The teacher wrote back to me, and I reproduce for you here the full text of her reply, completely unexpurgated:

Please just have her change it.

That's it. No "Dear Mr. Scrutator", no "Hi,", no name signed at the bottom. Just that one line exactly as you see it above. In response to my 603 word email (which I will happily make available to any interested party) explaining why I found it important that she intervene in this situation. (Well I'm Mr. Scrutator not Mr. Pithy.)

Now I'm sure gym teachers are very busy and can't be bothered with minor administrative decisions like keeping pornography out of their classrooms, so I wrote back and pointed out that my daughter had expressed the opinion that she didn't really need my approval because the teacher had already said it was OK. Kids can be so charming when they are in the grip of adolescent hormones. I also took the liberty of pointing out that, at least in my own opinion, it was hard to see why a teacher would approve of this song. I speculated a little: the teacher might not have known the lyrics and omitted to vet them, which is not very good oversight, but at least it's not as bad as knowing about the lyrics and not giving a shit, either because you don't think they're pornographic or you don't care that they are. That's much more worrisome, and I said so. Which prompted her to write to me and say:

Those are some serious accusations please feel free to come in anytime.

So I guess I'm supposed to chaperone my daughter's gym class if I want some reassurance that they're not dancing around to pornographic music. I guess the teacher's job ends once the lesson plan is finished.

In the end my daughter's group picked a different song. She could not remember either the name of the song or any of its lyrics, interestingly, but she did say that it was something by Justin Timberlake. I suppose there's some small consolation in that--his songs are disgusting too but for different reasons.

So here I am wondering whether I overreacted. For what it's worth, my wife did not think that I overreacted, and she even likes Robin Thick's "Blurred Lines" INCLUDING the video. But it's difficult for me to escape the worry that I'm just being an old conservative fuddy-duddy. I took up the matter with one of my colleagues who is both a woman and a progressive, and she also thought I was fully within bounds to react the way I did. But I'm still wondering about this.

When I was 12 (in MY day...) I was listening to music by such groups as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and the like. The Stones are probably the edgiest of the three, but they're arguably not very edgy. But they were certainly edgier than, say, Elvis Presley. When I compare

Wise men say
Only fools rush in
But I can't help
Falling in love with you

to

I met a gin-soaked bar room queen in Memphis
She tried to take me upstairs for a ride
She had to heave me right across her shoulder
Cause I just can't seem to drink you off my mind

I'm left with a feeling that, although things had "moved on", as it were, they were still arguably in the same ball park. But I can't help thinking that some sort of line has been crossed, that we're not only not in the same ball park any more, we're not even playing the same kind of game. I've been looking around at lyrics for a while now and "Talk Dirty To Me" is just the tip of a very disgusting and vile iceberg, an iceberg in which women and young girls are treated as literally nothing more than blowjob machines for young men who want lots of money and lots of visceral pleasure in their nether regions or they won't be satisfied. (They can't get no satisfaction, it seems.) And their lyrics attest to their attitude that this is what women "really want" anyway, so why not make them do it when they pretend otherwise. This is the world that my daughter wants to aurally immerse herself in, and I find it rather disturbing.

There are rumors about our middle school--rumors that are believed by students, parents, and teachers--to the effect that oral sex is also just the tip of the iceberg there. There is a lot of sex of other kinds, and lots of experimentation with drugs. This middle school is not one in which deprivation has driven kids to find bizarre forms of escape, it is one in which the students are mostly suffering from affluenza. So I'm putting my foot down and I'm not letting her listen to this kind of stuff. I am a grumpy conservative, but I'm also enough of a progressive feminist to think that young girls can do better things with their minds than listen to this crap. And there's certainly no point in putting money into the pockets of vile, self-styled artists who promote a worldview in which women are not persons but tools and whose contribution to culture is not merely negligible but downright negative.