What's Happening to our Little Girls?

Hello peoples,

I was sitting in a waiting room again the other day so I picked up a Maclean's that I hadn't read. It was old(ish); I think it was from January. The letters section had several letters from readers about an article in a previous issue on how we're dressing our daughters. They made me want to read the article, but that issue wasn't there and I had to go, so I looked it up online and found it here.

It's a little long, but the essence of it was that we're dressing our daughters like little tarts and the author of the article was investigating the possible reasons as to why. She covered most of the common answers: girls are hitting puberty earlier, they are trying to emulate older girls, girls and young women have become one of the most targeted demographics for marketers, and my personal fave "everyone else is wearing it".

I will grant you that girls are reaching puberty at earlier ages on average now than we did when I was a pre-teen. I will also grant that little girls have always looked up to and wanted to imitate the older girls in their lives, this is not new. However, the next two reasons don't really hold water for me. Since when do we buy kids things they don't need just because someone has introduced them to the market? Further, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid if someone said to my mom "everyone else is doing it", her usual response was "if everyone else decides to jump off a bridge are you going to do that too?"

The article mentions that one company introduced a line of thongs for little girls 'because little girls worry about visible panty lines too'. The only reason a child would possibly care about this is if we told her to. There is no reason to even mention something like that to a child, and even if she has visible panty lines, that's okay. She's a child: she should be wearing underwear! With the days of the week, or superheros or flowers or something on them! Not things like 'juicey' or 'sweetcheeks'.

Another argument for allowing your daughter to dress like a skank is that parents don't want their daughters to not fit in with her peers and what with all of the pressures of life, sometimes it's just easier to give in. Well, I admit, I am not a parent, so this is a little bit like a priest giving marital advice, but I'm going to anyway. As soon as you let your children pressure you into making decisions you don't want to make just because you're tired or stressed out, you've lost control and you will never get it back. What kind of a lesson are you teaching your daughter with behaviour like that?

Or, you just don't care all that much and are just using that explanation as an excuse. Which is entirely possible. There are many many young women today leaving nothing to the imagination and they think they're sexy. They dress like that on purpose. Perhaps they think it's cute to dress their 6 year old just like mommy.

For the record, these clothes are not practical. Plastic heels for toddlers are counterproductive to their proper spinal development. Plus, they could hurt themselves. Tank tops? On a child? Low rise jeans? Toddlers and little girls typically do not have hips to hold them up and thus, they slip down. Belly tops? Mini skirts? You really can't do much in a mini skirt.

One of the biggest obstacles we have to overcome as a society before women and men are really equals is the sexual exploitation of women. One of the more insidious aspects of our sexual oppression is that it is so ingrained in society that most of us (women included) don't even question it. We think that because women can 'choose' or we can say 'no' that we are now equals. We think that pornography is okay because the women participating aren't being forced. This is simply not true. I am not going to digress into a rant against the pornography industry right now, but this is where it begins. With little girls. And they keep getting younger and younger.

Why are we dressing our little girls like tarts? If it's not sexual exploitation, then what is it?

Drive safe peeps, (and put a sweater on your kid!)