Ren

Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.

Last year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were being assigned to high school students. “The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read,” Stickney says, “has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.”

Every year, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, conducts studies about…gender in media. Consider these findings, which have been consistent for years:

“Females are almost four times as likely as males to be shown in sexy attire. Further, females are nearly twice as likely as males to be shown with a diminutive waistline. Generally unrealistic figures are more likely to be seen on females than males.

Males outnumber females 3 to 1 in family films. In contrast, females comprise just over 50% of the population in the United States. Even more staggering is the fact that this ratio, as seen in family films, is the same as it was in 1946.”

Or, these conclusions, recently reported in an ABC news report on the topic:

“Twenty years ago, the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today, she weighs 23% less.”

Artist Don, 77 — who created the plastic pink flamingo lawn ornament in the 70s — proposed to Nancy on their first date in 1976.

Nancy, of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, said: “Two years later I made Don the same shirt I was wearing. We’ve dressed alike ever since. We love it.”

Do men know what it feels like to be looked at like we are looked at? To have gawking, bugging eyes glancing over your skin and body like it isn’t even your own? Like it isn’t even a body? To feel someone’s gaze penetrate through your clothing like that?

Is it possible to consider what that does to a woman’s dignity? To her spirituality? To her emotional security and stability? Those kinds of feelings do not build up the strong, confident women our country boasts it has empowered. They do not help show women they are loved and valued by their Creator. They do not build up women of strength and independence; they create women who cower.