A generation of skanks

"Look, Mama, she's naked!" I'm waiting in line at the newsstand with my very observant 2-year-old daughter, and she is pointing to Rolling Stone magazine. On the cover is 21-year-old singer Christina Aguilera, sprawled on a red velvet blanket. She is wearing black leather boots, black nail polish, one studded bracelet, ratty hair extensions, and as my child has so innocently noted, nothing else. Aguilera's privates are strategically hidden behind a guitar; her backside is tastelessly, tritely, exposed. The article lays bare all the silly, sordid details of Aguilera's new album (appropriately titled "Stripped"), her new hardcore music video (titled "Dirrty," with an extra "r" thrown in for, you know, edge) and her transformation from bubble-gum, Mickey Mouse Club member to foul-mouthed vixen. The young woman who once sweetly warbled the theme song to the Disney movie "Mulan," now grunts and writhes in a thong and kneepads, thrusting herself onto every moving object in her way, while "singing" the following "lyrics": Ah, dirrty (dirrty) Filthy (filthy) Nasty, you nasty (yeah) Too dirrty to clean my act up If you ain't dirrty You ain't here to party (woo!) DJ's spinning (show your hands) Let's get dirrty (that's my jam) I need that, uh, to get me off Sweat until my clothes come off In a pathetic attempt to prove that this is not just a made-for-TV act, Aguilera has been spotted around New York City re-enacting her "Dirrty" video in popular nightclubs. The New York Post's gossip page even launched a "Christina Aguilera Skank Watch," which tracked her recent visits to local strip clubs, where she "got lap dances," "fondled the breasts of a buxom stripper" and "was spotted cuddling with some sexy female friends at a 'Drunk Love' party." "F--- the pretty," Aguilera retorts when asked by the Rolling Stone reporter about her tamer, younger years as a teen idol. "F--- the dessert -- where's the tequila?" she exclaims, apropos of nothing. Aguilera's other favorite f-word is "flava." As in: "I want the boys with the flava." Explaining why she doesn't usually date "white boys," Aguilera expounds with faux ghetto flair: "He's got to have some flava and edge to him. I don't discriminate because of color. I actually dated my first one recently. I put some cream in my coffee." Flava lover Aguilera herself is paler than vanilla ice cream when not slathered in coffee-colored, self-tanning lotion. "I don't see anything wrong with being comfortable with my own skin," Aguilera snaps defensively, as she strikes another gangsta pose and shows off her ridiculous body piercings -- which Rolling Stone has painstakingly diagrammed for the masses. As I am returning the trashy magazine to the newsstand rack, my toddler chirps in again: "Mama, where's her shirt?" I answer: "Her mama forgot to tell her to put one on." My daughter, naturally, has a follow-up question: "Well, where's her mama?!" That's exactly the question I ask myself whenever we encounter some young Aguilera look-a-like and her friends hanging out at the mall with their thong straps glittering out in the open, their hip-huggers succumbing perilously to the forces of gravity, their noses and eyebrows and tongues marred with metal, and their faces plastered with red light district makeup. Where were their mamas -- and dadas -- to teach them that slutty is not sexy? Gutter talk is for vagrants, not for young ladies who want respect from the world. Promiscuity isn't a sign of maturity. It's a sign of self-loathing. Being "comfortable in your own skin" doesn't require having to bare every last inch of it in public. From Madonna, to Britney and Christina, to the under-dressed teens at the mall, legions of girls have been raised to believe that letting it all hang out is the only true path to womanhood. Christina Aguilera is a sad symptom of this cultural zeitgeist. Stripped of her inhibitions and sense of self-restraint, it's much too late for mama to put her peep-show-profiteering daughter's shirt back on. This naked truth cannot be disguised: The era of radical feminist sexual liberation has produced a generation of shameless skanks.