It may have come to your attention that tomorrow is that crazy ass sugar-fueled holiday known as Halloween. We fully intend to take part since we are lucky enough to live in a neighborhood that is awesome for trick-or-treating and because, of course, I finally have a child to TAKE trick-or-treating. I fully intend for Tori to keep me stocked in candy for quite a while (what, I should let her eat it?). Heh.
I successfully beat down all of my impulses to dress Tori like a little princess (a daily battle, I assure you) and Charlie and I settled on this costume. It's adorable, seasonably appropriate, and (god forgive me) wholesome. Unless you think chocolate is evil, in which case we can no longer be friends.
Back in my single days, when I bothered to get dressed up for Halloween (ok, and even for a while after I wasn't single anymore), I had only one costume--something slutty in black. Witch, vampire, whatever--as long as I could wear dark lipstick, too much eyeliner, and show a ton of cleavage, I was happy. I loved having an excuse to put my junk all out there.
But I was in my twenties when I did that. Even in high school, I managed to keep my costumes low on the slut-o-meter.
But these days, costumes for girls have gotten out of hand. Mothertalkers recently had an entry where they discussed this. Have you seen these costumes? Like this one? Or this one? Does anyone seriously think it's a good fucking idea to dress a PRETEEN as a FRENCH MAID?
Mothertalkers links to this article in Newsweek that discusses the fact that the "sexy" costumes are being targeted to younger and younger girls. Even the firefighter costume comes with fishnets, apparently.
Holy fucking cow.
We at a weird place culturally. We are hypervigilant about pedophilia, even possibly fetishizing it in the media (seriously, doesn't anyone else find this television show kind of gross?). Don't get me wrong--I have no desire to return to the days when children who are victimized are told to be ashamed. I prefer our more honest society. But the idea of a bunch of TV producers sitting around a computer monitor pretending to be 14-year-old girls to lure older men to them for entertainment purposes seems... I don't know. Wrong, bizarre, and shameful.
But what is even stranger is that right when we are telling men that being attracted to young women is disgusting and criminal, consumer culture is telling us to dress our young girls more like adult women. So we dress up our 'tweens as college girls, and then punish men for thinking it's sexy. It's some sort of freakish disconnect.
It frightens me that Sarah's daughter, who is already taller than I am at 11 years old, has costumes like those to choose from. And looking at those costumes, it feels like girls are getting to spend less and less time being GIRLS and having to jump into being women that much earlier.
When I was ten years old, I was so completely unaware of myself as being anything other than a kid. It wasn't until I was 12 or so that the pressures to do things like wear makeup and put on disco-style dresses with side slits (hey, it was the late 70's when I was 12) happened--and even that seems kind of young. Are girls today sneaking makeup on the school bus (ahem) at ten? Eight?
I find this all so frustrating. How am I going to raise Tori and allow her to spend a nice, long period of her life just being a kid instead of being a girl? Am I already starting this process when I buy her the jeans that have a flare at the cuff?
Ug. This is a tough time to raise a daughter in America, isn't it?
