Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Wild Girls

From December 29^th through January 2^nd, Lawrence Downes' opinion piece remained on the Times most e-mailed list. The title, "Middle School Girls Gone Wild", is provocative enough with its allusion to the notorious videos of inebriated college women. But the essay's argument turns out to be a calibrated and effective expression of hauteur.

The French word signifies loftiness and arrogance of the "Let them eat cake" variety. The English equivalent is haughtiness.

In American life, hauteur is a faux pas, a social blunder. Those who seem to raise themselves above the hoi polloi risk earning everyone's resentment. We're all equal here, and no class, learning, or morality vaults anyone to a higher stratum. So get down on our level and quit with the French and Greek.

There are probably only two acceptable forms of hauteur to Americans. One is cool. If you happen to be cool, you can look down your nose ring on those who aren't.

The other form is virtuosity. Extraordinary skill earns you a quota of arrogance, which many will admire you for exhibiting. Michael Jackson. But you must be careful not to exceed your quota. Michael Jackson.

Downes' feat is to display hauteur while writing about sex, and without recourse to cool or claim to virtuosity.

He describes girls re-creating music videos in a school talent show:

"They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don't smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. ‘Don't stop don't stop,' sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. ‘Jerk it like you're making it choke. . . . Ohh. I'm so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.' The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades."

Here's his problem. Downes deplores the behavior but he can't out-and-out call the girls sluts. One doesn't say that about seventh-grade girls on the editorial page of the New York Times. It's unseemly. Neither can he out-and-out say, "They musn't do that." One doesn't moralize about sex because it's immature.

So how does Downes express disapproval when the two easiest forms of hauteur will land him in trouble?

First, he positions himself for a clear shot. The piece's opening sentence: "It's hard to write this without sounding like a prig." I promise you, dear reader, says Downes, I will try to be mature in what I am about to say. But I have this problem that "it's hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay". So hear me out.

Then he stays in character, the not-cool dad in the out-of-it remainder of his life. While "parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud" the dancers, "I just sit there, not fully comprehending." You see, I was with my 10-year-old daughter who "hadn't warned me" what life was like in middle school these days. I was expecting "something different. Something younger."

In this context, his frank description of the dancers (quoted above) calls forth the reader's own disgust. Downes is confident the reader will identify with him rather than the seventh-graders. "I see your problem, buddy."

Aligned with his reader, Downes can fire at will.

He aims: "It is news to no one, not even me, that eroticism in popular culture is a 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet, and that many children in their early teens are filling up." He shoots: "What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society's march toward eroticized adolescence - either willingly or through abject surrender."

Schools can't do what parents won't, he says. Chaperones at school dances have no authority to stop the students' pelvic thrusting. If schools tried to ban the talent show exhibitionism, parents would be the first to protest.

Downes nails the irony: "Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones' ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life."

Such is the posture of Downes' hauteur, from which he pours brief but withering scorn on his peers. "Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction." And this mocking send-off: "It's as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first, Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don't seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn't stand for it - much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of the school auditorium."

Successful hauteur makes the lower orders ashamed. Downes accomplishes this by contrasting parents' high aspirations for their girls with their craven surrender to popular taste.

As an antidote to evangelicals' knee-jerk denunciations of immorality, this piece offers a model for being wise as serpents.