DO BAD GIRLS ALWAYS WIN IN THE END?

High School Musical Star to Get Millions After Release of Nude Photos.

To our teenagers, it must seem like this kind of bad behavior is a winner. Kids are savvy today, and they know it’s unlikely that the nude photos of Vanessa Hudgins, star of Disney’s hugely popular (and lucrative) High School Musical, will throw a monkey wrench in her career. After all, hardly anyone had ever heard of Paris Hilton before her sex tape, and Britney’s posing without her panties hasn’t hurt her either. Vanessa is already saying all the right things, apologizing, going to church with her parents, and generally acting demure. The release of these photos may actually throw her career into overdrive.

Parents, older and wiser than their kids, know that failing to respect your own body doesn’t win you anything in the long run. Vanessa will one day realize that cheapening her image and flushing away her dignity isn’t the road to real self-esteem, but that’s hard to grasp in the throws of young stardom. I urge parents not to focus on the negative, but to find positive images for their kids to admire, like Reese Witherspoon and Beyoncé Knowles.

This kind of celeb misbehavior makes parenting really difficult. Parents are trying to raise their girls to have respect for the privacy of their own bodies, and here their idols are in various stages of undress. The real message to young girls is an unhealthy over-emphasis on body image. After all, how many teenagers actually look like Vanessa? This leads to problems like eating disorders. And “what you see is what you get” is the subliminal message – it encourages bad behavior in boys and men. This leads to problems like sexual abuse, date rape, and a host of other behaviors that we all deplore. It’s no coincidence that more than one out of every three girls is sexually abused today.

Nudity sends a mixed message. I tell parents: teach your kids that sexy is one thing, but slutty is another.