The issue that surrounds Primark’s selling of padded bikinis for seven year olds, and the articles condemning it that have appeared in the recent press, have caused me to start thinking about common sense. Or more accurately, lack of it –and surprisingly not from Primark, who have clearly been positioned as irresponsible and villainous in this case.
Have any of these commentators, so quick to jump on the bandwagon, actually seen the ‘padded’ bikini that began the controversy? I have; it is just a bikini top. It is pink with gold stars. It is something I would have worn as a seven year old, with the only thought on my mind being that it was pretty. The seven year olds who bought the bikini, and their parents, will have had nothing further from their minds than sex.
And this is the problem. It is the media that has made this piece of clothing ‘sexy’, and no one else. The media’s obsession with paedophilia has caused controversy where there really is none. Surely they should have more important things to write about? I heard there’s an election this week.
I run a Rainbow unit, meaning I come into regular contact with girls between the ages of five and seven. I am also involved with a unit at home, and have been since the age of thirteen –so I have seen a wide spectrum of girls pass through in over seven years. I have noticed small things over the last two years or so, with regards to the ‘sexualisation’ of children. They are things that those so fond of condemning the issue would jump at: one six year old liked her mother to straighten her hair for her. Another had a pampering party for her seventh birthday. A mini pink limo picked up L and her friends, and they went to a children’s beauty salon, where they had their nails painted and strands of their hair semi-permanently dyed purple. They loved it, but they were no less children because of it.
L, the week after her birthday, proudly showed me the purple streak in her hair. Just as quickly, she moved on to tell me about her day at school, and the book that she had started reading. She was more proud about the book than the hair, which begs the question: why is the media telling these girls that they can be fashionable or clever, but not both?
The truth is we only learn later that it is perfectly fine to be manicured, highlighted and generally enhanced, whilst still being intelligent enough to become academically successful. And if the media keeps telling pre-teen girls that they have to choose, to fit in with their peers it is fairly obvious which direction they are going to take.
Suri Cruise wearing ‘high heels’ was quickly jumped at by the press. They just looked like sandals to me. Likewise, Miley Cyrus’ little sister Noah was pictured wearing a short skirt and leather boots and the press went crazy. The boots admittedly might have been a step too far, but the outfit was in no way sexual until the press made it that way. The ten year old has also been criticised for wearing an outfit that resembles ‘a French maid’ –but it seems to me that at such a young age she would just have seen a pretty, poufy skirt. Miley Cyrus herself was condemned for ‘pole dancing’ during an awards show, but watch the footage and you’ll see than she doesn’t dance near the pole, and that it seems to be there for safety. Would Cyrus’ critics prefer that she fell off a moving object and injured herself?
There are exceptions in everything, of course. The sight of Jordan’s daughter Princess bedecked in false eyelashes, unable to hold her eyelids up because of them, with the glamour model shrieking that she looked ‘like a mini mummy’ is fairly haunting. But a girl dressing up in innocence and being vilified by a biased press that seems to misinterpret everything is hardly the same thing.
I would conjecture that children are younger for longer in our society than they have been in most cases throughout history. In the Victorian era and before, lower class girls would often be working before they were even teenagers. Upper class girls faired no better, being married off to the best suitor at the earliest opportunity. Who could forget Keira Knightly’s disturbing portrayal of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, on her wedding night –which was also her seventeenth birthday? Henry VIII’s grandmother was married at the age of twelve and gave birth at thirteen. How was this better?
Sonia Poulton’s article in The Sun this week cites cliché and little original thought. She criticises Miley Cyrus for wearing ‘skimpy tops and impossibly short skirts’. Cyrus lives in Los Angeles and it is May. What does Poulton expect her to wear? A little common sense with regards to this supposed ‘sexualisation’ wouldn’t go amiss.
Back to the Rainbows. A conversation a couple of weeks ago highlighted the pure innocence that they have, whatever the press say. Five year old A had drawn a picture of herself –with her boyfriend. This began a bragging competition, which to some might sound worrying –although it isn’t. ‘I’ve got two boyfriends,’ L told A, on seeing her picture. Their friend chipped in that she had four. Quickly, it descended into the implausible: ‘Well, I’ve got a HUNDRED!’ And after a slight pause, ‘Well… I’ve got infinity.’
I don’t think any of us can say that we were much different as six year olds, even if we do believe it was in the glory days before all the talk of sexualisation started. It is the media who started the obsession, and it is they who need to end it –because in a paradoxical way, talking about sexualised children is more likely to encourage paedophilia than anything parents or Primark have done. Don’t snipe at an innocent child in dancing shoes, when in reality it’s you doing the damage.
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