Parents Who Let Their Children Dress Sexy
I have a daughter who is in the 100 percentile for height. She wears size six and seven clothes right now. She is four years old. I have to shop for clothes for her in the big girls section since the toddler section hasn’t fit for a year now. I am horrified by the choices we have for her to wear. A few weeks ago we went to Macy’s (with a coupon, of course) to find her an Easter dress. There were a couple of nice traditional Easter dresses, but there were several dresses that looked like they should come with a complimentary pole and hooker heels! I think Madonna wore one of the dresses on her “Like a Virgin” tour back in the ’80s. These dresses sparkled and shimmied and just looked trashy hanging on a hanger. Of course, THESE are the dresses my daughter is attracted to.
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease, Mommy. I love the pink one. See how it has jewels?” (Yeah, where her non-existent breasts go. I guess if I bought her the padded push up bra from Abercrombie she’d fill the jewels out nicely.) “Oooh, I love how my back shows in this one, Mommy!” (Who makes a backless Easter dress for kids?)
Easter SHOE shopping was another battle. (We managed to get the dress thing worked out, but the shoes from last year are definitely not going to work.) My Amazonian child has an enormous foot too and now wears big girl sized shoes. No more cute little white sandals or Mary Janes for her. Nope, now she has choices like wedges or 1.5 inch heels to choose from. There is always a random pair of ugly sandals she can wear and tons of ballet flats (which we have loads of). Of course, she wants the heels. “Londyn has high heeled shoes, Mommy. Why can’t I??”
Our little girls have such a long road ahead of them already filled with landmines like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, depression, drugs, sex, and more. WHY are people like Londyn’s mom trying to put them on that road earlier and earlier? Body image is a BIG deal in this country. It’s bad enough that when WE were 12, 13, and 14 years old we started worrying about if our asses were too big and our boobs were too small. Why in the hell would we want to start that crap with our five, six and seven year olds? Let’s give them a couple more years of liking themselves.
Ugh. I don’t know who to punch: the manufacturers of this shit, the stars — like Miley Cyrus — who wear this crap, the retailers who stock it, or the consumers who buy it. I think, ultimately, the blame goes to the consumers — US. (I realize there are a couple kids out there with Gold Cards, but most of the buying is done by mom and dad.) If we’d just stop buying this misogynistic whore-wear maybe companies would stop trying to sell it to us and Miley would realize she’s irrelevant and she’d go away.
