Young Female Celebrities With Reputations In Crisis

“One thing is not in doubt: a lot of parents are wondering about the effect our racy popular culture may have on their kids and the women they would like their girls to become. The answers are likely to lie in yet another question: where do our children learn values?” From The Girls Gone Wild Effect, Newsweek Magazine’s Cover Story.

According to Newsweek, like never before, kids are being bombarded by images of oversexed, underdressed celebrities who can’t seem to step out of a car without displaying their well-waxed private parts to photographers, writes Assistant Managing Editor Kathleen Deveny with Assistant Editor Raina Kelley in the current issue of Newsweek.

In a recent Newsweek Poll, 77 percent of respondents say young women celebrities like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan have too much influence on young girls. Eighty-four percent of those polled say sexuality plays a bigger role in American popular culture than it did 20 or 30 years ago and 70 percent say this is more of a bad influence on young people today than a good influence.

In the February 12 Newsweek cover, “The Girls Gone Wild Effect,” (on newsstands Monday, February 5), Deveny and Kelley examine whether there really are harmful long-term effects of overexposure to Paris Hilton and whether we are raising a generation of what one L.A. mom calls “prosti-tots,” young girls who dress like tarts, live for Dolce & Gabbana purses and can neither spell nor define such words as “adequate.”

Educators say they don’t believe most girls in middle school wear short skirts or midriff shirts to attract the attention of older men, or even boys, Newsweek reports. (High school is, granted, a different story.) Sixth graders dress to fit in with other girls and for acceptance in social groups. “They dress that way because that’s what they see in the media,” says Nancy T. Mugele, who works in communications at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. “They don’t want to be different.”

One-day marriages aside, why wouldn’t girls be fascinated by Brit and her celebrity pals? These 21st-century “bad influences” are young, beautiful and rich, unencumbered by school, curfews or parents. “They’ve got great clothes and boyfriends. They seem to have a lot of fun,” explains Emma Boyce, a 17-year-old junior at Louise S. McGehee School in New Orleans. But fascination and admiration are two very different things. As they get arrested for driving drunk and feuding with their former BFFs, the Brit Pack makes it easy for young women like Boyce, a top student and accomplished equestrian, to feel superior to them. “My friends and I look at them to laugh at them,” adds Boyce. “Our lives seem pretty good by comparison. We’re not going to rehab like Lindsay.”

As Deveny writes, our anxiety about girls and sex is growing just as the statistics seem to be telling a different story. Sex surveys are notoriously unreliable, but the best available data show that the average age of first sexual intercourse for girls is 17, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and hasn’t changed by more than a few months in 20 years. The overall teenage pregnancy rate in 2002, the most recent available, was down 35 percent from 1990, according to the Center for Disease Control. And while celebrity idols stumble in and out of rehab, the rates of drinking, smoking and overall drug use among teenage girls have declined in recent years, says the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

That some girls dress like Paris/Britney/Lindsay is empirically true. But it’s difficult to draw a straight line between the behavior of celebrities and the behavior of real girls. “We certainly don’t see our girls clamoring to get to downtown Chicago to the clubs,” says Mark Kuzniewski, principal of Aptakisic Junior High in Buffalo Grove, Ill. And while girls may admire Britney’s clothes and dance moves, her students “can’t understand why Britney would wear no underwear,” says Michelle Freitag, fifth-grade teacher in suburban Chicago. Their verdict: Britney is a “hootch,” which is a polite way of saying “slut.”

A few comments from the Reputation Doctor regarding young female celebrities with reputations in crisis and their impact on young girls everywhere:

WARNING TO PARENTS: Young female celebrities today don’t care about being role models to young girls. They only care about making money and having fun.

Most young female stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton really don’t care about being role models. They have been told how important being a role model is to their long-term careers and they have rejected that advice from their own parents, managers and PR consultants. Many young celebrities move out at an early age, are very immature, buy their own home and have too much money, which is dangerous combo. They rebel just like other teenage girls, but their rebellion is seen through the prism of the media microscope day after day. Sadly, they continue to garner support from tweens and teens every where, as parents look on with disgust, but these same parents don’t step up to the plate and…PARENT.

If young girls learned proper values at home and had mature and balanced parents who spent time with them, demonstrated their love with actions and held their children accountable, these celebrity influences would be reduced.

I see it time and time again: parents today who want their children to be their friends instead of their children. I see parents afraid to offer solid boundaries, rules, discipline and accountability for their children’s actions. I see parents not willing to discipline their children because they fear their children will not like them and rebel. Sadly, these parents are in crisis themselves and they are the root of the problem within their children. Not disciplining a child is not love, it is actually irresponsible, unloving and damaging. Sad but true.

Communication is the key to educating young girls about the behavior of their young female idols in Hollywood.

Do you really think hiding a magazine or clicking the channel on the TV is going to stop your daughter from learning about the latest inappropriate behavioral crisis of Britney, Paris or Lindsay? It is time to get real! Your daughter will then learn about it at school from a friend, buy the magazine herself and hide it or see everything anyway on the Internet. They go to Youtube daily and have their own pages on MySpace and you don’t even know it. True parents don’t hide, procrastinate or run from communicating about difficult subjects with their daughters. By the way, this is not just a job for Moms. This is also a job for Dads to educate their daughters on the impact of their behavior on boys. Most experts would argue the relationship between a father and a daughter is just as important or more important than the relationship between a mother and her daughter. Just as important is how parents should be mirroring an appropriate and loving marriage relationship for both their daughters and their sons. Where do you think kids should be learning the most? At home from their parents! Time to step up to the plate with your daughters. Don’t allow these young female celebrities to be the biggest influences in your daughters’ lives. That is your job as a parent. Your child’s reputation is counting on you!

Remember, do the right thing when your reputation is in crisis and seek the counsel of an experienced reputation management expert. It will be a major challenge, but ultimately the rewards of repairing your reputation will be great. Why? Because Your Reputation Is Everything!™

Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohen, Paris Hilton, Tara Reid

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