Mixed messages

I ended last week tearing into the in-bred abortion that suffices to encompass the prevailing standards for male dress. As it happens, a related topic crept to the fore while I was writing and for the sake of symmetry I decided to broach it today rather than some nebulous future date.

Little girls are not something I run across at work, obviously. It is in fact one of those things that are assiduously warded against. However, I exist in places other than home and work and many of those places contain people who have managed to spawn. As such, tolerating someone else's crotch-crickets is very much part of the cost of modern society.

This would be a society increasingly terrified of itself. Otherwise rational adults will succumb to gibbering hysteria as soon as the sacred cause of protecting children is invoked. Reality shows involving online predator stings are popular. Stories of people doing cruel and malicious acts upon minors have been huge media stories. To hear some people talk, the sidewalks are crawling with pedophiles and child murderers like lice in a kindergarten. How any toddler escapes harm if their nightmare world is even remotely true is nothing short of miraculous even with embedded GPS tracking chips at the base of their skull and Sesame Street print titanium chastity belt and matching Kevlar vest.

No, things are never as bad as the terror zealots make them out to be. They're also not as safe and secure as the "all people are inherently good" sheep want to tell it either. The truth is somewhere in the middle and quite honestly, the worst stuff is as much happenstance as it is unwariness. The little moppet just happens to catch the criminal's eye by being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

All of which makes me wonder how many Technicolor shades of crack people are smoking putting children, especially little girls, into adult styles of clothing. I'm not talking about stuffing a toddler into a sized down biker jacket and work boots. I'm talking about putting a prepubescent girl in a bikini. Letting her explore and identify with her gender is all well and good. However, some things such as that two piece swimsuit are designed with secondary sexual characteristics in mind which children, by definition, do not have. Which means that rather than conform to a level of modesty requested of physically developed women in this country, it suggests their presence, thereby sexualizing the child.

More than a few times, I and my friends have shared horrified disgust as some parent trots their little darling by tarted up in tube tops, miniskirts, and/or other clothes that are identified with adult physique.

What do you think the effect is on the population at large when you take visual cues that are programed as sexual and attach them to non-sexual subjects? What do you think the effect is on the child who is establishing their gender role when something completely alien to their understanding is applied to their interactions with the outside world, even if only observed body language? Since when is it "cute" to gift-wrap a kid for those with an unhealthy attraction to them? There is something incredibly sick with any parent that would put their young progeny into clothing that would be termed as "sexy" on someone at eighteen. If you send your little boy scampering down the beach with a Speedo with "honey buns" stenciled over the butt, is anyone going to be surprised when the NAMBLA convention starts breaking out the cameras, lotion, and candy?

People need to snap the bloody fuck out of whatever private wonderland they're living in and make some responsible choices for their brats for a change.