We’re in West Edmonton Mall and it’s November but the stores are crowded for Christmas.
Teens in skinny jeans and middle aged women wearing Forever 21 and babies in strollers. I’m holding my boys’ hands and we’re following Trent who’s carving out a sort of path when we pass it:
Victoria Secret, with a close-up photo of a woman whose cleavage is plastered to the window, her boobs all over the glass, and my four-year-old son looks, and keeps looking as we pass, and turns his head to keep staring at the woman whose skin is in his face.
I want to smash that window in, I want to steal that moment back with all of its nakedness, and not because I’m a prude but because I’m a mother.
That Victoria Secret ad violated both my son’s innocence and me, as a woman (tweet this). It turned us into objects; there was nothing personal or intimate about it.
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| via reckless youth on instagram |
We live in a hamlet without billboards or malls so the city is sensory overload and I’m deeply aware of objectification. Of sexualization and we’re raising up men and women who have no sense of shame or honor, no sense of compassion or empathy for the people on the billboards or in the lingerie on the window but simply a desensitized appetite for carnal pleasure.
It must stop. I say this as a daughter whose own mother and father fast-forwarded kissing scenes, and shut the movie off if there was a sex scene, and I’ve walked out of my own share of movies. Because I’ve been raised to believe that what enters the eyes also enters the soul.
My son now has a strange woman’s cleavage in his soul.
Call me old-fashioned. Call me a mother whose sole concern is her family’s welfare, spiritual and physical, and will go to all lengths—be it smashing a window (which I didn’t—I restrained myself) or praying every living moment for my sons to long for purity. To hunger after righteousness, to have empathy for their sisters and brothers and to see all human beings as God’s creation.
It’s about their father sitting down and talking to them, when they’re older, about why he doesn’t watch porn, because it hurts women, and it hurts men, and it hurts children. And it hurts God, who made men to cherish women and women to respect men and kids to look up to them both.
It’s about watching movies and television together and teaching our children to critique the commercials, to consider how advertisement is solely after their wallets, and to be cautious viewers in a very thoughtless culture.
It’s about humanizing a digital age. Putting hearts to airbrushed photos.
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| via reckless youth on instagram |
Our sons are learning about lingerie before entering pre-school. And I don’t know about you, but I refuse to let advertising have the last word (tweet this).
This is war, mothers.
Let’s fight for our boys.
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Sign this petition HERE to keep porn from being a standard feature on the Internet