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If you’ve watched sports recently, you’ve likely seen the Edge Shaving Gel commercials with go-go dancers frolicking inside a man’s beard. My oldest is perplexed by these images. The clothes are foreign to her, as are the girls’ gyrations. That they’re soaring into a man’s nose at the end only complicates matters. I’m enraged that I cannot share my love of football without inadvertently sharing our society’s love of sexualizing young women. I give the previous channel button a workout as we dodge the soft-core porn. We talk about the ads and I struggle to find the appropriate words to explain it all. I then discover that her 5-year-old eyes still see it as silly, not sexy. I have a little while longer before I need to be brilliant.
It’s a dicey proposition to watch TV on autumn weekends, but that’s not the only time. My wife and I recently watched The Wrestler after the girls were presumed asleep. Naturally, our oldest wanders out just as Marisa Tomei strips for Mickey Rourke. Talk about awkward! I stumbled for words like a teen that’d been caught staring at the blurry static of an adult channel. I’d never advocate lying to children, but at that moment I told her Tomei and Rourke were a Mom and Dad acting silly while getting ready for bed. She bought it; it’s a situation she has context for. Granted our silliness doesn’t usually involve a lace bra, red velvet sofa and a garter belt.
