This rant from blogstress Mamacita says a mouthful:
“Have you looked closely at the little girls’ department lately? It looks like a training school for prostitutes….
“When did ‘toy’ lipstick become bright red and start lasting all day? Why would a six-year-old child need to carry a purse to school? Why is there makeup in it? Why does she know how to use it?
“There are clothes in the little girls’ department that nobody would buy except Brooke Shields’ mother in ‘Pretty Baby.’ Except…somebody’s mother IS buying them, and probably thinking ‘doesn’t she look pretty’ in them….
“Tiny little girls, wearing makeup and boobless versions of adult slinkwear. What kind of mother dresses her child like a bimbo?
“Because that’s what these little girls look like, you know, when their mothers layer them oh-so-carefully in slinky satin underwear, croptops, hiphuggers (before they even have hips!) skirts that barely cover the subject, fishnet stockings, and HEELS. On a little child who has RECESS to deal with!…
“What is going through these mothers’ minds when they buy this sexy stuff for a seven-year-old child? Why don’t more schools forbid it? I don’t believe in censorship but clothing a little girl in Victoria’s Secret and sleaze is NOT right.”
Hat tips to Kimberly Swygert’s Number 2 Pencil and also the Education Wonks.
And before all you liberated types tell me that the notion of dressing children like children is a repressive bourgeois notion from the Victorian 19th century–because before then, children were always dressed like little adults–take a look at the young princesses in Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.” Compare their garb to these costumes for adult women of the 17th century. Notice any differences?