The Mall - Rated R?

I have a rant that needs to be ranted and I am sorry that you are about to be subjected to it. I am about to sound like someone's grandmother but I can't help it.

On Friday night, we went as a family to the local mall. Dh wanted to check out the soccer shop for the new England jersey for the World Cup. We decided to have a junk food meal and I wanted to see if I could find any decent hair stuff for Pk. We don't go to the mall that often these days so we wanted to try and fit everything in.

Just outside Gymboree, which is on the second floor, there is one of those places that the floor is cut out and there is a glass railing so that you can see down to the level below (I am sure there is a fancy term for that but it escapes me right now). Pk loves to run to the glass and look down, which she did. I followed her and was disgusted at the view. Directly below us, was the huge storefront for La Senza (I don't know whether this is an international chain or just Canadian, so, for those of you who don't know, it's a bit of a Victoria's Secret knock-off, just with much less choice and, frankly, a somewhat tackier atmosphere). There were HUGE poster in the windows and the posters featured what looked like what I would expect outside a strip club. There were women in totally unnatural positions wearing fuschia stay-ups, tiny underwear and bras. I was really shocked and, frankly, disgusted that this was the image my daughter was absorbing.

Yes, I am becoming more conservative in my old age, I will admit but really, I start to wonder if there are ANY standards anymore. Yes, part of my issue is that I do believe in a thing called modesty (which I realize makes what I have to say totally irrelevant in some peoples' eyes). On the other hand, my objections go much further than a belief in not parading around like a prostitute. We all know the huge self-esteem issues being faced by women in our culture. A steady diet of fashion magazines in our teens and uber-perfect people on the big (and small) screen has done a number on our perceptions of what a woman needs to be and many, many of us walk around with the belief that we aren't good enough. I know that I can't entirely shelter Pk from that but really, shouldn't we be able to go shopping at the mall without having our eyes burned by that kind of thing? Yes, it is a lingerie store but there are many that manage to have tasteful, elegant displays in the window without looking like a window front in the red light district in Amsterdam.

How do we protect our girls from the belief that they are ONLY, ONLY, ONLY sexual objects and that their value comes exclusively from the ability to please a man sexually? I hear these horrible stories of young girls engaging in the most degrading of practices (in the mistaken belief that well, it's not really sex..."). Please, please, please let me raise my daughter to value herself enough and to have the dignity to not allow herself to be degraded like that. I feel really lost sometimes in the culture around us. I see so much that makes me so upset and, frankly, so sad. How did we become so lost? How, as the generation raised by the "feminists", did we so lose our way? How is it that so many women allow their daughters to sell themselves and just shrug their shoulders and sigh?

I expect to have to filter the media images coming into our home but really, do we have to swear off shopping, too? Where does it end? Not too long ago, I finished the Beth Moore Daniel study and wow, do the parallels with Babylon ring true to me right now.