Posted on 07/08/2011 9:29:34 PM PDT by TheDingoAteMyBaby
Children are so sexualized in our society that it seemed plausible a mother would give her sevenyear-old daughter Botox injections to give her an advantage at baby beauty pageants.
The story, which went viral last month, turned out to be a hoax.
But it's not a stretch to imagine it happening. Watch a few minutes of Toddlers and Tiaras - the reality show on cable TV about these pageants - or even its ads.
Toddlers and preschoolers strut like strippers and smile like pros. They are made-up, hair-sprayed, spray-tanned, shaved and waxed. It's a pedophile's paradise.
Last week, a British mom known as the Human Barbie gave her sevenyear-old a voucher for breast augmentation for her birthday. The poor little thing's sixth birthday present was pole dancing lessons.
If this early sexualization were limited to that small, bizarre sliver of society, we could all just sigh or tut-tut and get back to what we were doing. But it's not.
Spa parties are now the rage among the tween-set and younger.
Abercrombie and Fitch sells a "pushup bikini bra top" for girls as young as seven. After concern about it went viral, it was rebranded as a "triangle top." But the retailer didn't pull it from the catalogue, just as nine years ago complaints didn't stop the company from selling little girls' thong underwear despite complaints when it introduced them.
No one is yet selling toddlers' highheels even though they have been a favourite of celebrity baby Suri Cruise since she was three. For now, her superstar father Tom Cruise and actress mom Katie Holmes have Suri's heels custom made, although earlier this week they denied reports that her shoe collection is worth $150,000.
Little girls' desires mirror what they see and much of it is a bit appalling. Whether fish, fowl, toys or humans, one in four female characters was scantily clad in children's films released in the United States from 2006 to 2009. One in five was nude, according to research done by professor Stacy Smith of the University of Southern California.
"As a culture, we sell them out and expose them to all kinds of things and then we say, 'It's terrible, it's horrible,' " says Audrey Brashich, a Vancouverbased journalist and former teen model.
She believes the "intense modern obsession with appearance" began in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the advent of supermodels.
"Everybody knew the women only by their first names and simply because of their appearance," says Brashich, author of All Made Up: A girl's guide to seeing through celebrity hype and celebrating real beauty.
"Before there were [female] movie stars and entertainers who were beautiful, but also talented. But they didn't seep into the culture the way supermodels did."
Supermodels were part of a re-invention of celebrity. The silent beauties were photographed everywhere and their images pervaded global culture. It seems more than coincidence that their appearance followed hard on the heels of second-wave feminism.
Supermodels cleared the way for women like the Kardashians to become famous just by showing up.
Now, good genes or a good team of plastic surgeons, stylists and estheticians make fame seem so attainable that even celebrity makers are celebrities themselves, on reality TV shows like America's Next Top Model.
"What we've got going on is so toxic and so troubled that we've created this big mess for girls when it comes to self-esteem," says Brashich.
Most will never be thin enough or rich enough to achieve the supermodel standard and, in trying, they often forgo opportunities to play sports, study and feel comfortable with the bodies they were blessed with.
But it's little better for boys, says Brashich, who has two sons.
They are exposed to an increasingly narrow definition of feminine beauty through mainstream media, computer games (which mix sex and violence) and sports marketing which exploits the female form (as the Whitecaps soccer team did recently with the image of a spray-painted woman in its advertisements).
There is no quick fix, no instantreplacement role models, no easy ban to make this all go away. But something needs to be done because if their dreams of fame don't pan out, both girls and boys are being set up for failure.
I had kind of a wierd upbringing, so maybe that’s why I don’t really understand it...My first crush wasn’t till the age of fourteen, and it was on Tommy Lee Jones. :-P
Indeed nothing is private or off-limits anymore.
In Los Angeles many kids in the sixth grade are stoners,msm seldom does a story on the problem.In Ca. stoned is a way of life,any questions why it’s screwed up.
Washington State may have CA beat. According to my kid brother, Mary Jane is one of the four food groups up there.
in the nineties he was going to Evergreen State University (St. Pancake—Rachel Corrie went there) Apparently, he was acting real weird and messed up until his live-in girlfriend made him quit. Considering how crazy she turned out to be, it must have been pretty bad. But all’s well that ends well. He’s now an imaging software analyst for some hush-hush agency.
Washington State may have CA beat but we out number you murder rates.
Good for your brother he grew up and now has a life.
I was 12 and the object was the much older brother of a friend from a large family. He was 22. I was devastated when he got married a few months after I decided I was *in love* with him. Luckily, I was too naive to do anything embarrassing to myself.
Also, don’t forget that little children are exposed to Viagra and Cialis commercials every 5 minutes on TV. They probably think that two people can’t pass each other in the hallway without it becoming a sexual event.
Then there are the constant commercials for “low T”....
Why God warns about idolatry.
There’s an economics text book out there with Viagra used as an example.
Actually, the first supermodels — society women famous simply for being pretty — appeared back in the 1880’s. Women like Lily Langtry. Almost as soon as there was photography, there were people buying photos of other people they didn’t even know, just to look at them. Seems ingrained in the human psyche.
That said, I think it’s pretty sick for people to present their young daughters on a platter this way. Yuck.
Yeah, it’s about time some poster of the news said what some of us were trying to get at for a long time. Chances are, I would be willing to bet that there’s a great deal of kids who have problems related to how hyper-sexual a great deal of our culture is. Someone fits this gender role, or someone fits that one, and so on.
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