Dear Urban Diplomat: how do I talk my daughter out of being a Sunshine Girl?
Dear Urban Diplomat,
My daughter is 19 and desperate to pose as a Sunshine Girl. She keeps threatening to send in her picture, convinced it’s the path to stardom. How do I talk her out of it?
—Sunblock, Pickering
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have posed as a Sunshine Boy back in 1997 and gone on to impressive things (the majority of his filmic repertoire notwithstanding), but there are countless others whose showbiz careers began and ended on Page 3. The challenge in dealing with young people is they excel at imagining positive outcomes and suck at anticipating bad ones. Your daughter views her moment in the Sun as a bikini-clad first step to fame; you see the potential for deep regret down the road. Treat her like the adult she is, and offer to support her fame-seeking ambitions in other ways. Acting class. Singing lessons. Whatever it takes. Realistically, none are likely to result in fame, but at least she’ll learn something and won’t have to get half-naked for the camera. If she opts to go through with it anyway, take comfort in this 21st-century truism: sex tapes, leaked celebrity nudes and Snapchat shenanigans have changed the world enough that Sunshine Girl shots seem wholesome by comparison.
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Dear Urban Diplomat,
My daughter is 19 and desperate to pose as a Sunshine Girl. She keeps threatening to send in her picture, convinced it’s the path to stardom. How do I talk her out of it?
—Sunblock, Pickering
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have posed as a Sunshine Boy back in 1997 and gone on to impressive things (the majority of his filmic repertoire notwithstanding), but there are countless others whose showbiz careers began and ended on Page 3. The challenge in dealing with young people is they excel at imagining positive outcomes and suck at anticipating bad ones. Your daughter views her moment in the Sun as a bikini-clad first step to fame; you see the potential for deep regret down the road. Treat her like the adult she is, and offer to support her fame-seeking ambitions in other ways. Acting class. Singing lessons. Whatever it takes. Realistically, none are likely to result in fame, but at least she’ll learn something and won’t have to get half-naked for the camera. If she opts to go through with it anyway, take comfort in this 21st-century truism: sex tapes, leaked celebrity nudes and Snapchat shenanigans have changed the world enough that Sunshine Girl shots seem wholesome by comparison.
Send your questions to the Urban Diplomat at urbandiplomat@torontolife.com){kind=link}
Ask your daughter to put together a list of Sunshine girls who has actually gone on to have any “real fame,” and by real fame, I don’t mean being a Playboy Playmate or staring on a reality TV show for a few seasons. In the UK, being a “Page 3” girl can lead, in theory, to a long term career (not really in acting but in TV presenting and modeling) and real wealth, but in North America, that just isn’t the case. Ask your daughter who’d she’s rather be if she had the chance, Jennifer Lawrence or Pamela Anderson, Emma Stone or Carmen Electra, Jessica Chastain or Kendra Wilkinson. Being a Sunshine Girl is a career path to the later…at best. I’m not naive, I do recognize that a lot of people would happily settle for the latter kind of success vs no success at all, but maybe you can convince her to aspire for more, good luck.
She’s 19, it’s her choice, her business, and not yours. True, there’s an *extremely* slim chance that it will lead to stardom, but that is true of everything- every acting class, every audition, every photoshoot, every networking meeting with a producer has a very slim chance of leading to success. But if we never try, we’ll never succeed. As Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. By all means, be realistic with your daughter and don’t get her hopes up. But as her parent, it is also your job to be supportive of her dreams and her choices. Let her do what she wants, and be there for her, whatever happens.
PS- Keanu Reeves was also a Sunshine Boy :)