| When Tweens Dress Like Tramps, Who's To Blame? |
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| Written by Gerri L Elder | |
| Thursday, 15 May 2008 03:42 | |
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It is absolutely sickening to see little girls dressed like sluts. With their middles exposed, high heels on their feet and more eye makeup than any adult should wear, we constantly see them and wonder why their parents would allow them out in public in such wildly inappropriate attire. The thing is that the parents of these girls are simply choosing not to fight this battle. It is a lot easier on the eardrums and door hinges to spoil a child than to make and enforce unpopular rules. When clothing manufacturers deliberately market garments that look like clubwear in sizes to fit tweens and these clothing choices are allowed by some parents, an epic battle begins. Many parents find it hard to say no to their little snowflakes, and there it starts. When the "cool kids" are wearing inappropriate clothing, it doesn't take long for all the kids to want to also wear trashy clothes. No one wants their kid to be an outcast, so the pressure is definitely on. Kids grow up too fast all on their own. Now with the clothing, underwear, shoes and makeup options available to tweens, the process is accelerated to almost comical proportions. It would be funny, except that it's so troubling. In England, the Tesco stores now carry a padded plunge push-up bra for girls who are about 7 years old. The cost of this highly offensive rag? Only about 8 bucks. A child who desperately wants cleavage at 7 is troubling, but if there were not a market for this type of thing it would not have been manufactured. Tesco has marketed some equally offensive products in the past. In 2006 the stores carried a pole dancing kit in the toy section of its website. The pole dancing kit was removed after public outrage. So where's the outrage about other "sexy" products marketed to children? It's up to parents to take a stand. Stores are going to carry products that sell. If the slutty clothes for tween girls were not selling like hotcakes, they would no longer be manufactured. It's purely and simply the principle of supply and demand economics. Young girls don't have a paycheck, parents do. Therefore parents must dig in their heels and stop this exploitation of their children. Cool clothes don't have to expose skin and those little feet will develop much better in good, supportive shoes. Style doesn't have to be sacrificed, but a message has got to be sent that it's not okay for little girls to look like tramps. While we try to protect our children from predators in society, it hardly makes much sense to package them up and send them out dressed as a pedophile's wet dream. Yet that's precisely what is happening. Trackback(0)
Comments (3)
  written by Tiffany, May 28, 2008
"Tweens and young teens are going to have sex (and sometimes get pregnant or get an STD) regardless of how they dress."
I think right here you've summarized the roots of the problem--not that what you've written here is a fact, but that people seem to accept that as a given, throw up their hands, and move on to how to deal with the "fact" that tweens are going to have sex. Physiology hasn't changed, and for hundreds of years most people managed to make it out of eighth grade without getting pregnant. report abuse
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 written by Capt. Obvious, July 05, 2008
Perhaps we as a culture need to accept the fact that post menarche girls (around age 11) have reproductive systems that are rapidly getting up to speed. At age 16 most girls look the more like sexy celebrities and models that they ever will after age 25. We as a society are failing to accept what nature has already dictated, sexuality begins in the early teens. By denying that, we are failing to prepare or allow our children to move gracefully into sexual adulthood. Which is safer, a teen that can have sex in their own home, with a supply of condoms purchased for them, or teens having sex in the back of a car in the dark corner of a parking lot?
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Reality television survives, ironically, through a carefully maintained web of lies. Some of those lies are simple and wouldn’t surprise most people: spontaneous events are shot multiple times, scenes are filmed out of season, time sequences are misrepresented. But the larger lies are the ones sold to the participants—lies that are absolutely acceptable because the contract says so. When you step into reality television, you must agree—explicitly—to be deceived, and that you have no recourse if the outcome of that deception is harmful. All well and good, perhaps, for adults who understand what they’re getting into. But what about an etiquette-school teacher who thinks she’s part of a documentary and ends up in Borat’s movie? A child rented out to Kid Nation?
If you want to look at the root causes, I suggest you start with the physiological. Tweens and young teens are going to have sex (and sometimes get pregnant or get an STD) regardless of how they dress. You might also look at society's changing attitudes towards sex over the last 50 years or so.