"You're not leaving the house in that, Missy!": a fight I dread

My oldest daughter is six and thankfully, still too young to want to wear sexy, grown-up, skimpy outfits. She's still very much in the throes of the princess bug and though her outfits get provocative, they only provoke attention because they are wildly colorful, over-the-top and unorthodox, like when she wears her white tulle ballgown over her azure sweatpants with her fur vest to complete the look. But I know the power struggles about what she wears, the "You're not leaving the house in that, Missy" fights are coming, because my daughter is headstrong and cares deeply about what other people think. Regrettably. exactly like me. So I found this piece in the NY TImes incredibly insightful and on a practical level, really useful:

Clothing Straddling the Line Between Sweet and Skimpy 

As someone who did change clothes on her way to high school, stripping off my jeans in the Ferry bathroom to slip on the mini skirt my mother wouldn't let me wear -- I know I won't be able to control what my daughter wears at a certain point. But I feel like these experts give a good overview of how to set guidelines for your kids, and help them to make good choices about what they wear, how they see themselves and how they present themselves out there in the world.

And, most importantly, it gives you slightly more elevated comebacks then, "Because it makes you look like a slut!" which is pretty much the reasoning I got.  Faulting "the pornification of culture" may not be a similar explanation but it sounds smarter, anyway.

Tricks or Treats

A few days ago, my husband sent me an email whose subject line read, “What we have to look forward to.” It read, simply:

“When Seconda comes to us wanting to wear one of these for Halloween--I'm letting you do the talking.”

Click on this link and you will read, as I did, about the dismaying trend of little girls dressing up in harlot-type Halloween costumes. The pictures feature young girls and tweens in miniature versions of the stripper-witch costume that has become de rigueur for women. And it’s awful on some many levels.

The knee-high boots and lace-up hot pink corsets are bad enough but the kid models are even doing sexy poses and I have to wonder, where’d they learn that? I mean, did the photographer direct them to bend one knee and put both hands on their hips or did they just intuit that this is what was expected of them? The worst is the “Alice in Wonderland Child/ Teen Costume.” Go ahead, click on it for a closer look.

Would you have ever guessed that was Alice in Wonderland? Are the black and white striped stockings supposed to be my clue? The floppy eared bunny she dangles from her fingers, ostensibly just the way she’d dangle a man along? As far as I know, Lewis Carroll’s formidably funny adventurer didn’t hook her way through wonderland. It’s a slap in the face to Alice and to girls and to literature. But the most egregious part is that this model, with her feet turned inward and knees together, is doing her best sexy school-girl impersonation and the fact of the matter is, she’s just a schoolgirl herself – a teen maybe, but still. I blame Britney, which is what I always do when I don’t know who to blame.

Look, I’m no Victorian. If I posted pictures of the Halloween costumes I wore in my college years and early 20’s, you’d be embarrassed to have the screen open at work. I remember that on Halloween of ’99 I had a big party at my apartment and dressed at a “post-millennial cyborg.” That’s a fancy word for super-skank in a duct –tape costume. It’s true, the only thing I was wearing was a bikini top and boy panties, both fashioned from duct-tape, with a pair of wings I made out of wire hangers attached. My good friend came n a pair of pasties. I’m no Victorian.

Nonetheless, I was an adult. Hey, if you’re a grown woman and want to sex it up on Halloween, I’m not gonna stand in your way. But for the love of all that is sacred, keep little girls little as long as you can. There’s plenty of time to wear knee-high boots and wield a pitchfork later. I’m all for free expression but sometimes you have to be the bad guy and say, “No way, Jose. Because it’s not appropriate. Because I love you. And because I said so.”

I just thought since David was going to let me do the talking, I’d get started a little early.