http://forrattle.blogspot.com/2006/10/corporate-paedophilia_20.html

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/10/17/the-veil-or-the-push-up-bra-its-a-false-nonchoice/

There could of course be some reason totally unrelated to the Australia Institute report, but the pictures from their Summer 2006 catalogue that I linked to upthread are no longer online.

I predicted over at my blog then that they wouldn’t still have it online in a week’s time.

This difference has implications for which socioeconomic class of teenagers is most likely to be groomed by sexual predators from an earlier age, and thus which group is most likely to end up with an unplanned teen pregnancy, bringing up further children in poverty at the mercy of the only fashion they can afford.

Indeed, so we get more of Peter Costello’s kids. More to mould & eventually direct into the army, or kitchen…& going by the ‘sexualisation’ thing you can see the Corporations in league w/ our HIGHER MORAL VALUES (lol) Federal Govt. are ensuring young girls are primed to work in the BIG FUTURE INDUSTRIES incl. Casinoes, Strip Joints, Porn, Fashion, Advertising, Pap Musik, Cosmetics, Hooters & other food chains etc…all courtesy of the USA…& the Packer, Berlusconi & Murdoch New World machine.

Many people in reacting to this report seem to be looking more at the 12yos than at the 8yos, and arguing that it’s nota ll that bad. I agree that it is natural for girls entering pubescence to start modelling both their behaviour and their clothing on adult women, especially the young adult women who get media and community admiration for their looks. Obviously it’s an art for a parent to balance indulging the pubescent’s natural experimental urges with some caution as to dressing in too overtly sexual a fashion.

Offering fashions for 8yos that emphasise non-existent cleavage, or which carry messages referencing sexuality in pop culture, or promote makeover play as superior to waterpistols etc are pushing that playful experimentation urge down into a demographic where IMO it doesn’t belong. I’m all with you on the “more naturalness and unaffectedness” regarding advertising and fashion for pre-pubertal children.

I also get a little disturbed by comments such as one up thread about what Salafists might be able to teach us. I ma glad though that the comment was made becasue it does tend to highlight the fact that the de-sexualisation of pre-teens , and even women in general may not be quite the boon for womens empowerment that is anticiapted. So there is a danger in a moral panic about female sexuality that does seem to me to lead pretty directly to that somewhat hysterical prudery (which is itself deeply prurient) that does not seem to me to be very closely co-related with the empowerment (i really hate that word but there it is) of either women or girls.

I tend to think that in a society where sexuality is more frank and women are allwoed to express rather than supress their own there will be an entirely natural tendency for girls, in role modelling their own behaviour to imitate that of adult women. I do think that there is often something totalitarian and sinister about culturally enforced notions of feamle chastity and purity. I think it almost always ends up being the case that women become the prisoners rather than the gatekeepers of such notions.

All that said I do think there is a genuine concern when 10 yo-ish girls are encouraged dress and comport themselves as sexual objects, but it I think it is not the sexiness itself that is the problem, it is the trashiness of it. I think that fighting thsi battle by try to de-sexualise growing adolsecent girls is proabably a losing battle, and for the reason above I ma not even sure it is the right fight to be waging. I mean past remedies have involved something like convent like conditions being imposed to somehow maintain the “purity” of adoslescent girls – I can hardly beleive that that is what anyone here would be seriously seeking.

I think a better approach is to use the positive connotations of sexiness and hotness that many girls seem to model themselves against to push better role models. To me pushing role models with the message that they are being pushed precisely becasue they are NOT “sexy” seems pretty counterproductive. Maybe stressing the point that positive role models who don’t dress and behave like tramps and bimbos are actually more sexy might be more productive – I ma not suggesting that little girls all now switch to dressing in smart business suits or the like but that maybe stressing that “sexiness”, which to certain degree is a placeholder for the very naturall urge that everyone has to be appealing and attractive , wold actually be enhanced by a little more naturalness and unaffectedness.

While i’m pleased to admit I’ve been called a MILF more than once, who in their right mind would like their kid expressing this wish?
THe kids cothing company Pimpfants, evidently.
Sadly this not a joke.

Off the track, and on a health related level , there is serious debate and scientific study around the issue of precocious and increasingly early onset puberty at the moment.

There are a lot of hypotheses which are being seriously considered including the the issue being debated above (the premature sexualisation of children), to exposure to meletonin, exposure to chemicals in hair products and carpets etc, to being raised in single parent families without the mitigating presence of adult male pheremones/hormones. ( I kid you not)..

“The child is father to the man… no no, really, I wasn’t being poetical, I’m quite serious.”
–the revised Wordsworth

??

See, there’s your problem. Either there’s an awful lot of independently wealthy 11 and 12 year olds who have the pocketbook power to decide exactly where “they’re” gonna shop or not shop; or else there’s an awful lot of parents who should just learn to say more strongly how it’s gonna be.

I wonder if the famous “creeping postponement of adulthood” which has been in ever greater evidence in the West since the 60′s* has anything to do with this…

[* -- cripes, the 60s! Is there anything they *can't* do?]