The Onion

“Seems like just yesterday she was this creative 7-year-old kid, pretending her Barbie was the first woman president,” Hayes added. “My, they grow into little more than consumer goods so quickly.”

Marvelling at the rite of passage that all females make from girlhood into entirely disempowered objecthood, Hayes expressed confidence that the 17-year-old would one day become a highly prized physical possession for “one lucky guy.”

Parker’s classmates at Wakefield High School were also reportedly captivated by the adolescent’s transition from a young woman into an eye-catching repository for male gratification. High school senior Kevin Turner said that Parker had become a particularly alluring instrument of purely physical pleasure in the months since she was a young, conscious, independent preteen girl.

“I grew up with Ashley and never thought much of her before, but over the last year or so, I really started to see her for the beautiful little piece of equipment she is,” said Turner, expressing enthusiasm for how the teen had evolved into a dazzling sexual apparatus. “I’m thinking of asking that mere receptacle to prom.”

It’s been said that 20% of people go through life constantly puzzled by the behaviour of others while the other 80% is too self-focused to do anything but be puzzling… This is a classic example:

It’s written in the Onion’s usual snarky polemical style as a means of decrying the sexualization of women. But in it, there lies a disturbing confession:

We think it is naughty for a woman to want to be beautiful and sexually desirable. We decry men desiring her as perverse. We think it is terrible that she should want to be married or that someone would wish to take her to the prom because she is desirable. We regard her sexual maturation as a shameful and dirty thing and we regard with derision the desire for marriage (and the security it can offer) as exploitive and barely above prostitution for her to long for.

What exactly DO we want?

Wait, I’ve got the answer! All she needs to do is hide her body, not even give men a chance to desire her, ignore relationships as the path of weakness, become an iron-willed, self-made businesswoman and never depend on a man (or anyone else) for anything. Yep, finally, the picture of fully feminine, fully human and fully alive… Or something…

Or, maybe our entire society needs to grow up, stop seeing the world through the lenses of 12yr old boys and realize that a man’s passionate sexual desire of a woman is a beautiful thing — just as soon as that same woman is emotionally, spiritually, physically and mentally desired with the exact same force of passion.

Perhaps we really need to admit that our male culture doesn’t even come close to desiring women enough — and cutting away the one area where men make some sort of a lame attempt at desire is hardly our best option for an improvement on the situation…