Angel or Demon (Wait.. you mean those are my only two choices?)

I wrote this in 2007 sometime after Britney Spears's head-shaving incident:

I was raised with very few restrictions on what I watched, read, or listened to. I'd like to think I turned okay, maybe a slight fascination with the macabre, but nothing too out of the ordinary. (Which I blame more on twelve years of catholic education than my parents letting me stay up late to watch The Shining.) I imagine I'd do the same had I a daughter. I fully believe when you start putting unreasonable limits on small things like hairstyles and music, kids rebel in big ways.

That being said, my future daughters will not be listening to Britney, Lindsay or anyone else surfing a crazy wave lately.

Do I still stand by that? Sure. With some reservations.

I have no children, so I'm far from qualified to give advice on what girls shouldn't be exposed to. At the tender age of nine I watched Madonna writhe on the floor in a tattered wedding dress at the MTV Awards, and I came away unharmed. (Maybe with a predilection for torn, white lace and smeared eyeliner.) A few years later I copied Siouxsie Sioux's fashion sense. My parents never panicked and wrote each new obsession off as "this soon will pass," and it did. I was never into the "safe" pop stars like Debbie Gibson or Tiffany. Even then I wasn't so daft that I couldn't see past the facade. I expect my future daughters to do the same. In fact, I'd feel more comfortable knowing I gave them the tools to make good decisions. The overtly sexualized images of then Britney and, I guess, now Miley bothers me less than the circus that creates them. I'd rather have my daughter listen to an artist who carves her own path, warts and all, rather than a disposable hero(ine) whose warts are a consequence of the star-making machine. That being said, kids will usually listen to, read, watch what their friends do.

Lately it's Taylor Swift who has gotten a lot of media attention for not playing into the trampy pop star stereotype. but not without a little backlash. Autostraddle's epic post, Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos garnered quite a bit of attention (and spawned an even larger discussion on Jezebel).

The rush to exalt Swift is (I believe) a desperate attempt to infuse our allegedly apocalypse-bound country with a palatable conservative ideology in the form of a complacent, repressed feminine ideal. It’s working ’cause Swift writes good songs and America is terrified that its children have been scarred by Britney Spears’s psychotic vagina and Miley Cyrus’s obnoxious adolescence.

The Jezebel posts defending Swift surprised me, to say the least. Not because I expected a sort of "cooler than thou" attitude to prevail, but because I assumed everyone would see the age old bad girl/good girl dichotomy at work. Maybe she writes her own songs, maybe they resonate with kids, but why is the only alternative to the overtly sexualized the other extreme: pure and untouched? Shouldn't there be some sort of confused in-between, you know, where most teenagers fall?