Why do teenage girls try so hard to look sexy?

[araktsu]

Assuming you are writing from a place where commercial television dominates culture, the answer is that they are responding to marketing. (For example, anorexia follows wherever media consistently promotes images intended to convince adolescents that thinness = beauty.)

Among some closed, repressive societies the model for which they receive most acceptance and approval is to cover up their heads. There are other societies, such as in Amazonia, people are mostly naked most of the time, and in those places there is no advertising, no question of the "shallowness in today's society" (whatever that means).

People want to be liked and they want to fit in. This is a social instinct. Also, adolescents are going through puberty; typically females go through puberty earlier than males. Human beings have a natural propensity to seek the attention of the opposite sex shortly after this occurs.

This is a built-in feature of human cognition and behavior. Advertisers take advantage of that fact and the fact the human beings engage in observational learning from a very young age and continue that way unless they are trained to learn by some other method.

Take a critical look at the ads aimed at adolescents, particularly in magazines. Note how there is typically a photo showing what a young woman is supposed to wear to attract males.

Teenage girls have a variety of models affecting their behavior. One is the bond they see between their parents; another is women they meet or observe in schools. The rest is what they see on video infotainment.

Consider almost any video of Beyonce: Is it music or is it an advertisement (for make-up, hair styling, and underwear)? That answer is that it is both, and is designed that way. The typical female role portrayed in music videos shows success = sex object decked out in bizarre make-up, having no useful skill other than singing, no intellectual capacity, whose greatest asset in life is the ability to attract males by displaying her body. That works to the favor fashion marketing.

The commercial message consistently aimed at women from an early age is, “Whatever you look like, you should look different—and you should look like this…” A similar appeal is made to sell liquor to adolescents, and tobacco also.

You on the other hand are resorting to act out the model of moral judge of individuals (apparently adolescent females more than others) and all the rest of society as a whole. What it comes down to is whether or not you get to control what women wear.

What do women have to wear before you can just go about your business? Are they causing you a problem? No, of course not, unless they come up and sit on your lap. What do you do if you go to a beach where women are wearing two-piece bathing suits? Do you think they are out there to torment you (they are not)?

We are all naked under our clothes. Try to practice some intellectual self-control now that you know. Your propensity to judge your fellow human beings and society adversely just because there exist female adolescents wearing skirts and within your viewing range is unsupported by evidence of any harm to you or to the young ladies.