{"id":1315918,"date":"2019-10-21T20:12:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/shannon-column-cleavage-wars-or-how-deep-is-the-valley\/"},"modified":"2019-10-21T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T02:12:00","slug":"shannon-column-cleavage-wars-or-how-deep-is-the-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/shannon-column-cleavage-wars-or-how-deep-is-the-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"Shannon column: Cleavage wars or how deep is the valley?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Michael Shannon<\/strong>
<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Here we have another age\u2013old conflict with no end in sight. Combatants are dug in and take no prisoners. The justifications behind the conflict have been heard repeatedly. The grievances and provocations are ancient. The danger for collateral damage is very real. And there\u2019s already evidence of crossing a red\u2013line border.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not even talking about Syria \u2013 unless your local high school is named Bashar al-Assad High. This grinding, Ypres\u2013like conflict is over what girls wear to school, and it has chewed up generations with no end in sight.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s such a fact of life, one wonders why the WoePost even bothers?<\/p>\n

Yet there it was on the front page of the murder section: \u201cIs a crop top empowering for girls? How parents navigate what\u2019s \u2018appropriate\u2019 for high school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notice how Little Miss StuffIt isn\u2019t even in the picture. It\u2019s the parent\u2019s job to \u201cnavigate\u201d what the school will tolerate. What the parents will tolerate isn\u2019t part of the equation.<\/p>\n

That wasn\u2019t how it worked at the Shannon household. Clothes that didn\u2019t make our daughter look like a slut were fine with us and we never had any complaints from school.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the situation at the Bloomer\u2019s. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m not letting you leave the house looking like that,\u2019 said her mother, Tara Bloomer, telling her daughter that she looked like an \u2018easy girl.\u2019 A \u2018prostitute.\u2019 Seeing his daughter walk down the driveway, Sky\u2019s father, Bryan Bloomer, tried asking her to change. But the teenager didn\u2019t budge. She got into her friend\u2019s car and left for school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parents who raise their children, instead of living in an uneasy truce, will notice a number of problems immediately. Clothing choice isn\u2019t the main one, it\u2019s only the most recent one.<\/p>\n

The first was naming your daughter \u201cSky.\u201d The second was creating a discipline structure at home that persuades your daughter she can leave the house wearing something you forbid and not suffer consequences. And finally, who\u2019s buying the Cleavage Collection?<\/p>\n

Our daughter went through a brief cardio workout before leaving for school. She raised her hands over her head and then reached down to touch her toes. If no belly buttons or bloomers were visible, she was good to go. The rules were followed because following the rules was enforced from a very early age.<\/p>\n

I get the feeling at the Bloomer household parents tried to encourage Sky to \u201cmake good choices.\u201d<\/p>\n

The really sad part of the daughter\u2019s defiance is she thinks she\u2019s being empowered. Dad tries to reason with her, \u201cTruly powerful and intelligent women don\u2019t have to show off everything they have.\u201d \u201cOkay, misogynist,\u201d she replies. Then Sky proceeds to dress to please every mouth\u2013breathing misogynist waiting at school for that day\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

The equally dizzy Post reporter claims, \u201cTeenage girls today are using the language of female empowerment to defend their outfit choices to the adults around them, claiming autonomy over their bodies and calling out clothing restrictions they see as sexist.\u201d Only teens have been \u201ccalling out restrictions\u201d since the \u201860s and it has not proved persuasive with anyone besides reporters and professors.<\/p>\n

High school boys don\u2019t look at a girl dressed like a hoochie\u2013mama and think, \u201cWow, does that girl look empowered!\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead they look at her and hope she drops her pencil.<\/p>\n

Another airhead decided to really punish the leering guys by not leaving anything to the imagination. \u201cA 17-year-old senior at Blair High School, started wearing more revealing clothes last school year after a breakup with a boyfriend who was \u2018very controlling and very manipulative,\u2019 she said. \u2018I wanted to rebel against him. That was one way I did it.\u2019<\/p>\n

She stopped wearing bras and started wearing \u2018a lot of semi-see-through tops, a lot of camisoles,\u2019 \u2018My midriff is almost always showing to some extent.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise she misses the point that her \u201crebellion\u201d is defined by someone else\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n

She also knows her outfits are tacky. \u201cEven if we\u2019re dressed completely respectably, we still face the same stuff we would face if we\u2019re dressed half-naked. We still get assaulted, we still get belittled, and we have our intelligence knocked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe, but respectability lowers the odds.<\/p>\n

I have a question for weakling parents and their daughters: How many successful business women \u2014 outside of Stormy Daniels \u2014 dress like that in the workplace?<\/p>\n

All the teenage exhibitionists fall back on that old chestnut \u201ccreativity\u201d and \u201cself\u2013expression\u201d to justify dressing like they\u2019re going to a trafficking audition. But why does \u201ccreativity\u201d always involve subtracting clothes and never adding?<\/p>\n

Parents who allow their daughters to leave the house wearing an \u201cAsk Me About My Boobs\u201d top aren\u2019t doing their child any favors. In these situations when the chicken finally comes home to roost it\u2019s often accompanied by a little chick.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2019 Michael Shannon, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Michael Shannon is a commentator and public relations consultant, and is the author of \u201cA Conservative Christian\u2019s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times.\u201d He can be reached at mandate.mmpr@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Shannon Here we have another age\u2013old conflict with no end in sight. Combatants are dug in and take no prisoners. The justifications behind the conflict have been heard repeatedly. The grievances and provocations are ancient. The danger for collateral damage is very real. And there\u2019s already evidence of crossing a red\u2013line border. And I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1315918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 17:05:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}