by K.L. Cain

Created on: January 05, 2010

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

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