But today, when tabloid journalism is everywhere and the media tell kids that the way to get attention is to show as much flesh as possible, it's perfectly predictable that 11-year-olds would start patterning themselves after Lindsay Lohan.
So I don't see why anyone is shocked....shocked...and appalled -- to find that Halloween costumers are creating costumes for these aspiring sex tape celebrities:
Gabby eyed the Sexy Super Girl but decided against it. A friend at her Catholic school had worn that costume for a Halloween parade and pulled the already short miniskirt way up to cover her tummy. "That didn't look very good." But Gabby did like the Aqua Fairy, a vampy get-up with a black ripped-up skirt, black fishnet tights and blue bustier that comes in medium, large and preteen. A medium fits a child of 8.
No.
How about the Funky Punk Pirate Pre-Teen, with an off-the-shoulder blouse and bare midriff?
No.
Gabby pointed to the Fairy-Licious Purrrfect Kitty Pre-Teen, which, according to the package, includes a "pink and black dress with lace front bodice and sassy jagged skirt with tail. . . . Wings require some assembly."
Cheryl Cirenza shook her head in exasperated disbelief. "This is all so inappropriate. It's really disturbing," she said, eyeing a wall of such girl and preteen costumes as Major Flirt in army green, the bellybutton-baring Devilicious and a sassy, miniskirted French Maid, pink feather duster included. She'd just turned down her 13-year-old daughter's request for a Sexy Cop outfit. "When I was their age, I was a bunch of grapes."
But that was back in the days when Halloween was still a homemade kind of holiday, when an old sheet with eyeholes was a perfectly acceptable ghost and clumsily carved pumpkins on the front porch were about as elaborate as the decorations got. Now, Halloween is big business. Americans are expected to spend upwards of $5 billion this year on candy, ghoulish decorations and costumes. And the hottest trend in costumes, retailers say, is sexy. And young.
Fishnet tights, once associated with smoky cabarets or strip joints, now come in girls' sizes and cost $3.99.
Joe Thaler, head of TransWorld Exhibits Inc., runs the annual Halloween Expo for big-box retailers. He said suggestive costumes for girls burst onto the scene about three years ago and the phenomenon is so big that he's had to create a separate fashion show. The costumes have since moved to the plus-size market for adult women and now come in teen and preteen versions. Even little girl costumes show more leg and tummy than they used to. "They're just good sellers," Thaler said.
So why are they good sellers? Because people are buying them. The article cited above, predictably, blames the phenomenon on baby boomers, for all that the baby boom ended in 1964, which means that the youngest boomers are now 43 and those born in the last few years of the boom hardly constitute enough parents of 'tweens to account for the boom in hooker costumes for little girls. And last time I looked, younger parents were neither more able, nor more willing, to say "No!" to their children than their boomer forbears.
I'm not saying that kids should be forbidden to have any allure until they're in their 20's, nor am I saying that a little bit of dress-up is always inappropriate. I went to my senior prom in a dress better suited to Little Bo Peep than to a seventeen-year-old in 1973. But I'm not sure that preteen kids can draw the line between the attention their costumes get on Halloween and the attention they get when they show up in class in halter tops and bare tummies. And I'm not sure that when you send your ten-year-old out on Halloween dressed as a French Maid, you should be surprised when she learns that her only currency in this world is her fuckability. Nor should you be surprised when she becomes predator bait on MySpace.
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