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lyrics

Hi there, America
Chris Hansen here
With to catch a predator
Why don’t you have a seat?

What did you think was going to happen?
Did you really believe the effective strategy
Was to yell at yourself repeatedly:
Don’t think about little girls.
Don’t think about little girls.
Don’t think about little girls.
While you build the runways for Toddlers in Tiaras,
While you take the path Britney Spears blazed
and pave it into the Miley Cyrus superhighway?
When did you realize
The color of money
Is the same as unripened fruit?
But with enough lipstick and blush
you can makeup for age
by painting juvenile into bloom?

Why are your most common search terms:
Teen, cheerleader, barely legal, schoolgirl,
Why is labiaplasty
Even a word?
When you see a woman matured,
Do you want less?
Does the word “reduction”
Sound sexy to you?
Do you prefer veal
Over steak,
the taste of flesh
from legs too tender
to understand “sprint”?

History seems to indicate this started in the 60s.
Is it a coincidence
That submission becomes sexy
At the same time women’s empowerment begins building?
Are you scared to find the 19th amendment
Hidden in her hips?
The word “no” tucked between the creases of her lips?
Is this why you hunt for skin
too young to be fortified
with lines of resistance?

Thin,
Doesn’t mean tall and slender for you, does it?
It means small,
compliant,
Pliable,
Plywood,
Did the image of Twiggy,
Her Barely sprouted breasts
and easily breakable limbs
Suddenly turn you into dendrophile,
Leave you salivating for saplings
To scratch your initials into?

You squirm like schooldesk,
Test day,
No good answers.
You ask question
Like why the age of consent
Isn’t consistent,
I won’t say you’re wrong.
I will say
That even you,
broken clock,
Can be right
At least twice a day
If you choose not to move your hands.

Do you hear them ticking?
Is each day past puberty
A countdown to uselessness,
A bomb,
Filled with slow-motion shrapnel
Called “old”?

Is this show
How you justify yourself?
Sit in your couch
and denounce their perversions
Just a little too loudly?
But You like seeing them like this, don’t you?
Deer caught in headlights to for you to fawn over.

You connoisseur of schadenfreude.
You’ve turned guilt into a spectator's sport,
But when you turn off the television,
It always becomes a mirror.

credits

from Growing Up, Not Old, released June 30, 2016

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