Letting it all hang out: Foam parties at Night Club Now
Even though I’d never heard of a foam party, the video on our Web site looked familiar.
Rewind about 20 years and aim the camera at the dance floor at Balboa’s at NorthPark Mall or Lee’s in Rock Island, and you’d capture a similar scene. I say “similar,” not “identical.”
My generation didn’t know about spraying foam on a dance floor and lathering our almost-bare selves in bubbles as is done weekly in Davenport at Night Club Now. Our imaginations evidently were spent on dry ice and the disco ball.
But we did use something today’s teenagers don’t: clothing.
I’ve known that I’m a prude since the day I realized I was embarrassed by Madonna. Her provocative sexuality struck me as desperation, and I felt sorry for her. Poor thing evidently doesn’t have room in her mouth for her tongue because it was always out.
I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice person, and it’s not her fault that I can blush watching MTV alone.
By today’s standards, the Material Girl was actually fairly mild. Or, at least, she was of age.
What stuns me today is the trampiness of so many teenagers. Every time I see a 14-year-old girl in a shirt that’s really only a camisole, it occurs to me that her parents let her out of the house like that.
And I’ve said something about it, too. The reply I get from parents: “I don’t like it either, but the kids are dressing like that now.”
You know what my mom would have said if I tried to leave the house in a piece of lingerie and a pair of shorts? She’d have said, “You better be walking in your sleep.”
So I got my prudishness honestly. Even though I’m aware of it, it doesn’t make me any less stunned to realize that many parents and other adults are the accomplices in today’s objectification of young girls.
Teenagers have pushed on rules and convention since the invention of the hormone. That’s their job. But it’s their parents’ job to be horrified by it. They are supposed to wait up and snoop and ask questions.
Would the Internet be filled with naked pictures of teens and even preteens if their parents paid attention to what they were doing online? Would at least
17 high schoolers from the same class in Massachusetts have made a pregnancy pact if somebody was eavesdropping on a conversation or two? Frighteningly, maybe.
Look at the recent Vanity Fair cover photo of child star Miley Cyrus (a.k.a. Hannah Montana). What disturbs me about it is that someone at that photo shoot had to have directed the
15-year-old girl to remove her shirt. That wasn’t cool. In no way was that cool.
Maybe today’s teenagers are simply more honest, and they’re not hiding the fact that they’re having sex or at least are interested. I hope the honesty follows them into adulthood, and they pass on to their children whatever they learn from these days of near-naked dance-floor foam.
Maybe the grandparents will be listening.
Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.