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Is all that sexually-charged advertising and programming okay? The empiricists out there won't believe that it's harmful until they see hard evidence, but the saner denizens of our populace rely on the traditional evidence: an innate sense of norms, a little imagination, metaphor. This writer in Hendersonville, North Carolina uses the traditional route well. Link. Excerpt:

My sister and I were protected not only from advertisements we were much too young to understand, we were also spared the attitudes behind them.
There was an unwritten agreement among adults that there are certain themes children simply aren't ready to be exposed to. The invisible fence erected around the kids of those days was called childhood.
But the two little girls playing not a stone's throw from this billboard that would have been considered pornography in the '50s won't have a childhood. They will have a girlhood.
A girlhood is a lot different than a childhood. A girlhood is that time in a little girl's life when her body has not yet become a woman's body. Childhood is the time in a girl's or a boy's life when the world is a place of unbridled wonder, to be discovered, explored and savored without the burdens and responsibilities of adult knowledge.
If the billboard were all these little girls had to face it would be bad enough. But they will be sold the same message every day of their lives in a thousand different ways, in movies, TV ads, magazines and the way their peers dress in school.
To insinuate the themes of adulthood into every crevice of life robs children of childhood and the rest of us of a whole lot more. It robs our society of the innocent idealism of youth. It replaces the noble dreams of becoming a teacher, a firefighter, a nurse or an artist with the supreme goal of becoming a sex symbol.
It erodes the self confidence of all but the most beautiful children, and pushes those who are good looking into a premature sexuality they're nowhere near mature enough to handle.
A sexualized society teaches its children that love equals lust, and lust with anyone is OK, even for something as mundane as sneakers. The concept that sex is a sacred act, reserved for a committed relationship, is portrayed as an old-fashioned hangup.
We have been sold a bald-faced lie; a sinister double standard that teaches women they can be anything they want to be, but in order to get what they really want, they'd better be sexy.

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