The feminised child: a rant

Yesterday, I saw a little girl of about six out shopping with her parents. I watched her climb up onto a low wall and skip along the wall next to them, holding her mother’s hand. I expect you used to climb on walls when you were a child.

When she got to the end of the wall, her mother had to lift her down. Why? Because this six-year-old was wearing shoes with three-inch heels and couldn’t jump down by herself. I mean shoes for kids, she wasn’t playing dress-up.

Two weeks ago, I was walking along the street behind a short, slim young woman with obviously bleached blonde hair. She wore a denim mini-skirt, high-heeled stilettos and a tight top. She was with an older woman. Then they turned round and I realised that this ‘young woman’ was eight or nine years old. She was wearing make-up to go with the bleach and the stilettos. I’m guessing the woman with her was her mother.

What the hell is going on?

Girls and body image

Eating disorders are rife among women (and a small percentage of men). Mostly these are teenagers or college-age women, but one study showed that three percent of anorexics are pre-pubescent. Another reported that 80% of American girls age eight to twelve have negative feelings about their bodies. Eighty per cent!

Who’s to blame?

It’s easy to blame the media and the internet. A little Googling as I was writing this came up with the GirlsGoGames site (yeah, I thought from the name it was going to be porn too!) This site and its advertisements ‘reaches out‘ to girls between the ages of eight to twelve, and encourages them to play popular games such as The Shoe Quiz, Head 2 Toe Makeover and my personal favourite, Paris Hilton Dress-Up.

Bullying and peer pressure at school are also important factors for young girls wondering if they are ‘good enough’, translated as ‘thin enough’, having the ‘right’ clothes and shoes etc.

Of course parents can be partly responsible. Often, mothers inadvertently infect their girl children with their own body image issues, and fathers’ views can be destructive.

And quite often, I believe, parents must take more than part of the responsibility, they must take a big chunk of blame. I mean, what were the mothers of these two young girls I saw recently thinking? How far away is allowing/encouraging your child to wear high heels and make-up from the grotesqueness of child beauty pageants, from child pornography, from paedophilia?

Please understand, I’m not saying that paedophiles and pornographers are excused from their actions because parents allow/encourage young girls to dress in sexually provocative ways (that’s the completely unacceptable “she was asking for it” argument about rape). But surely the exaggerated feminisation of young girls is interwoven with a society in which huge numbers of men consume child porn or act out their sexual desires for children, sometimes on their own children.

Why “tomboy”?

OK, I’m struggling here not to fall into ‘when I was a girl’ stories and ‘children should be allowed to be children’ clichés.

But why are girls who are interested in running and jumping and nature and learning all kinds of things and who refuse to wear frilly dresses called “tomboys”? Why can’t they just be known as normal healthy children?

It’s clear from observation that many little girls like to dress up, crave pretty things, are often more polite and subservient than their brothers. These aren’t inherently bad things! But much of it is simply socialisation, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this socialisation starts very early.

Role models?

by sarah lace at deviantart

So where are the strong role models for children today? My knowledge of the television shows and other media available for young girls and boys is very limited, although I stumbled across the Willow Rosenberg (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) awful warning picture on the right and loved it!

There’s a lot mothers can do to help. Here (click on For the Mums)  is an excellent article with suggestions for ways of dealing with a number of scenarios around body image.

What do you think about all this?

Image above of Brooke Shields in the 1970s film Pretty Baby

Elsewhere:

The Endangered Species was a summit that took place earlier this month ‘challenging the culture that teaches women and girls to hate their own bodies’.

Kidscape is an excellent UK anti-bullying charity.