Generation Whoring Sea Donkey

From a year of totally unscientific postscripting, I have determined that there's only one thing on Salon worth reading: Heather Havrilesky's "I Like to Watch" television column. Here's a clip from today's installment...

Sure, we could point to the early precursors of this movement, the dadaist forefathers to their surreal rise to power: Madonna, wet T-shirt contests, "Dirty Dancing," "Baywatch," the neo-feminist insistence that dressing like a slut was a form of empowerment, the Spice Girls, Victoria's Secret, Maxim, the rise of high-end strip clubs, Hugh Hefner's kitschy but effective "Meet my five hot-slut girlfriends" publicity campaign, "Girls Gone Wild," Christina Aguilera's insistence on describing just how nasty she could be, Hooters, Britney Spears' transformation from winsome Lolita to "Slave 4 U"... The cultural precedents are countless, so countless that most of us can take at least part of the blame for the ass-shaking revolutionaries we created. Whether we purchased a Wonder Bra or proclaimed our right to wear short shorts to high school or hummed a few strains of Prince's "Dirty Mind" way back when, we were inadvertently sewing the seeds of a whole new generation of filthy 'ho flowers, little ladies who dress like Godless whores and talk like drunken sailors and swing their hips like wanton harlots, honeys who are not only dirty and shallow, but who proclaim their right to be dirty and shallow like they're engaged in a vital and important grass-roots struggle to safeguard the enduring freedoms of womankind henceforth.

And when you've had enough of that, go read Sarah Corbett's cover story in today's New York Times Magazine: The Women's War. Equal-opportunity PTSD. There is no pain you are receding...