Not sure whether people watched Question Time last night. Germaine Greer and Peter Hitchens were on, along with two very bland coalition representatives, so it was a parody of a debate rather than a genuine debate. I strongly feel that, despite my sympathies for a certain kind of 1970s feminism, of which Greer claims to be a representative, it does exactly the same thing as misogyny by reducing women to their bodies and their sexualities (by denying those bodies and that sexuality in quite a puritanical fashion, and telling women that they must reject that part of themselves). Greer's suggestion that flirtation is necessarily disempowering, 'coy' and' manipulative' is peculiar to me because it is utterly blind to context and circumstances. Flirtation can be disempowering, it can be empowering, and it can be neutral, depending on that context.
What scares me about this whole debate is, as other posters have written, that it depends upon teaching girls that their sexuality and the sexual power they may wield when they are women is an illusion or a sham and that there is a more authentic self to be had. I am horrified by the Barbie girl/Jordan/getting-your-8-year-old Botox culture, and am horrified at the lack of choice in baby shops for young boys and girls (all pink princesses and blue with trains and tractors on it) because it reduces children to parodies of themselves, to very restrictive and reductive notions of their identity and of their possibilities in the world. But I also think that, as an adult, wearing high heels and lipstick and fitted clothing doesn't make you less of a feminist, just as long as that is only part of a much broader, richer identity and as long as that performance of femininity doesn't hinder you - it is awful when women don't do certain jobs because it conflicts with their desire to look a certain way, for instance - and as long as we realise that it really is a performance and that in other contexts and other places we can perform our identities differently. Children don't always have the same self-awareness or ability to see through it all that adults have, but we're doing them a disservice if we don't at least try to teach them to see that.
All I want for my children is that they can grow up thinking that anything is possible, that all women are attractive (and not just those who fit a particular stereotype), and not to define themselves by reductive, restrictive marketing stereotypes. But it's naive to think they won't exist or that our children won't be aware of them. I think in general most parents and most young women achieve a balanced perspective by the time they're grown up - after all, we do have female doctors, astronauts, academics, army officers, writers, politicians, lawyers and so on, and while things are far from perfect we are able to conduct intelligent debates about gender politics. So I think avoiding all the padded-bra tat as much as possible, but also offering our sons and daughters as wide a range as possible of experiences, options and ideas about who they might be and who they might become, is the only way forward. Asking them to deny part of themselves/cover up/be more 'modest' is too simplistic and equally reductive as asking them to think of that part of themselves as all there is to them.
Not sure if any of that makes sense!