Dear Teen Vogue: Stop sexualizing our children

A Teen Vogue article from October has re-surfaced online in the last couple of days.

The headline “10 Best Vibrators for Beginners: How to Pick Your First” has made jaws drop—including mine.

This is a magazine targeting teenagers. That basically means children: 13 and 14-year-olds. And let’s face it, there are probably 12-year-olds out there reading too.

The article starts off, “As young people, it’s important to learn what feels good for us and what doesn’t, and masturbation is nothing to shy away from. In fact, we should all be doing it!. .. plus, it releases endorphins that make us feel happier and less stressed.”

Not only is this article encouraging sexual activity, but the article is listed on the “Gift Guide 2019,” so now your kid can get her and her bestie $200 vibrators.

Apparently, Teen Vogue thinks kids should be using sex toys and that vibrators make great gifts for the holidays.

Encouraging teens to be sexual is sexualizing teenagers.

Even as I type I can’t help but cringe and feel weird just writing about how … well, weird it is.

Why would a teen need a list of 10 different types of vibrators?

As if she knows what she likes sexually. As if she is ready and comfortable enough to experiment sexually.

And really, I shouldn’t even be using female pronouns because Teen Vogue has an entire online section named Identity with many articles about sexual and gender identity like transgenderism and non-binarism.

This section also includes articles like, “How to Masturbate If You Have a Penis: 9 Tips and Techniques” and “Anal Sex: Safety, How to’s, Tips, and More.”

Teenagers are much more children than they are adults. Let children be children and teens be teens.

Let teens live in the awkward stage where their bodies grow and change and they start to get shy around the opposite sex.

Let teens be slightly uncomfortable in their own skin—like when you don’t know what to do with your arms when you’re just standing around.

It’s all a part of growing up. And everyone grows up in their own time, naturally.

Let teens be inexperienced and uncomfortable with their sexuality. After all, this isn’t activity we should take lightly—or should I say casually?

At some point, society stopped letting kids be kids. Progressives have forced kids to grow up so fast and bear the weight of the adult world on their small shoulders: kids like Greta Thunberg whose childhood was “stolen” from her and lives with fear and anger because adults made her believe the world will end in 12 years due to climate change, or James Younger whose mother manipulated him into thinking he was a girl and was almost pushed into making a huge, life-altering decision of transitioning.

Kids and teens shouldn’t be worried or involved in such mature and complicated issues like sex, masturbation, and sex toys.

Teen Vogue also has a Politics section which, you guessed it, is completely anti-conservative.

I remember reading magazines as a pre-teen and teenager. Whatever happened to articles about fun sleep-over ideas? Or quizzes to find out what kind of mystical forest creature you’d be?

I miss the old days when children were allowed to be children and not at risk of being coerced into a deeply politicized and sexualized world by cynical and malicious adults.