This is mostly an account of my direct obervance on a generation gap as low as ten years. But I think it illustrates just how damaging celebrity culture has become.

Celebrity culture is a disease, especially for women. I know, it’s wierd for an 18-year-old to be writing that, isn’t it? Especially when my own dorm is full of victims of this rather horrifying attitude, while my roommate and I are content in our jeans and t-shirts and spending weekends watching movies with friends or studying instead of going out and drinking and hooking up. I was raised in a conservative household, and I never wanted to look “hot”. But I have a little sister who’s being raised with Pentecostal values-ankle-length blue jean skirts, no makeup, no haircuts-who is showing signs of emulating this sex-and-glamor lifestyle and it worries me. She’s eight years old and the other day I heard her say a scantily-clad doll looked “hot” and I almost smacked her in the mouth for saying such a thing. I was mortified. I know that’s not right, either, but I’m scared of where her Bible-based values will go when she becomes a tween, when peer-pressure REALLY begins to kick in. Heaven can wait for your classmates’ approval, after all. I’m not Christian, and I don’t believe in the Bible but if it’ll keep my sister’s mind in the right place and clothes on her body then I’ll embrace the religion for all it’s worth.

My sister is ten years younger than me, and she’s kissed…well, I’ve lost count of how many boys. I didn’t kiss until I was fourteen. She’s obsessed with makeup and hair and popularity while they couldn’t hold me down and put makeup on me until I was around thirteen. I know even my milestones are a little fast for some more conservative sects, but this is ridiculous. My eight-year-old sister is boy-crazed in a way that I was only during my middle-school years. Like I said, I worry. She emulates the stars she sees on the Disney channel while I emulated SpongeBob (he came out when I was around nine) and CatDog. She makes fun of me for being “wierd” and when she was playing with her dolls I heard her talking about how the “popular” kids were always winners. I didn’t hear talk like that until I hit middle school. Brains mean little to her, and while maybe I judge her against my years of nerdom and gothdom I know that I was never like that and neither were my friends.

Yes, we had Britney Spears and Christina Aguelira, but I liked Third Eye Blind and The Calling. That evolved into a taste for metal when I hit my teens, and I attribute that to my avoidance of an over-sexed glamorized culture. What will my sister become without those buffers I had, especially when Britney was targeted at tween while Hannah Montanna is for kiddies? Being “hot”, so much attention being focused on sex lives and party lives, my sister absorbs it like a sponge. Maybe my dad’s racism, something I’ve always abhorred, will become a lifeline for her and drive her away from rap music’s degrading of women. But there’s cutesy music of starlets that doesn’t sing about anything worthwhile. I wonder how her faith will hold when she’s already obsessed with popularity and looking pretty. My faith caved because I questioned it, but will hers cave because of peer pressure? She’s already kissed more boys than I have, and she glows with pride when she talks about them competing for her attention. I don’t want her sense of value to come from that.

My parents have set boundaries for her, but it doesn’t stop her from soaking up pop culture. She likes what she  sees, which disturbs me. An eight-year-old shouldn’t know the meaning of the word “hot”. They should’t be concerned with how many boys flock to them, and boys shouldn’t be flocking to them. When I was eight we chased each other and called each other gross. That’s what little kids should do. I wonder if there are things she doesn’t tell us, things she keeps secret. That’s even scarier. I get the feeling that while I coasted through my teens in band t-shirts and jeans, my heroes sweaty guys playing guitar or dead authors, she’ll try to raise hell with skimpy clothes and gossip about whichever celebrity is popular at the time. While I found “but everybody does it” to be a reason precisely NOT to do it, she will probably think in the opposite direction. While I listened to music about complex feelings and politics, she will listen to music good for nothing more than a dance beat. The goth/metalhead subculture might be one that parents recoil at, but it kept me decently (if not a little oddly) clothed, innocent (comparatively), clean, sober, and focused on deeper things than my complexion or finding “cute” boys. I fear that my sister won’t have this buffer, that she will grow up far too fast, that she won’t have a will to search for a deeper life. And the generation gap is only ten years. Maybe it’s because I never did conform, but it seems like things were different even when I was a kid. I may not be perfect, but I don’t equate my value with beauty. I know now how Amy Lee felt when she wrote “Everybody’s Fool” for her little sister, pleading her not to be suckered into celebrity culture. Desperate, scared, and horrified.