| (by Sam Maxfield 2001) © Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide) A six year old girl goes to the park with her mother. She's wearing a skirt and her mother says, "If you go on the swings everyone will see your knickers." The girl frowns, thinks about this, then pulls her knickers off and hands them to her mother. "Now they won't," she says, and heads for the swings. It's a lovely illustration of childhood logic - in fact extremely logical but it shows children lack the knowledge, and developed brain, to grasp all the social connotations and subtleties of adult meaning. Christine Odone caused an outcry last week when she criticised the current trend to dress little girls in sexy, adult clothes. Quote: "Encouraging little girls to act and dress provacatively risks not only turning on some pervert (tabloid short for paedophiles) but forcing the child into the world of sex. She will sense however unconsciously, that she is an object of covert desires and sinister fantasies. Much has been made of Odone's comments: fury by the agencies which protect children, accusing Odone of 'blaming' the child and giving an 'excuse' to paedophiles. To be fair to Odone the attacks on her seem an hysterical, knee-jerk reaction. Her 'blame' is directed towards adults not children. Last year's summer fashions for women were what I affectionately like to call 'Hooker about Town'. They emphasised breasts, naked backs, calf-muscles, midriffs, buttocks. They are clothes designed specifically to sexualise and fetishize female bodies. They are designed for adult women. Children want to emulate adults, that to me seems to be one of the necessary functions of childhood, akin to saplings stretching for the sky. But that doesn't make them adults. They are still children, with unbudded bodies. Small beings who think an hour feels like a year; that the sewage monster will get them if they don't make it downstairs before the toilet stops flushing. Small people who will trust any stranger with a bright bag of lollipops and some balloons. Why then are we so keen to dress our children, particularly girls, as adults? One answer, as always, is greed. The 'market' will attach its bloated, bloodsucking, corpulent body to any breathing thing. The exploitation of the 'tweeny' market is expanding at a dizzying rate. Arguably it is the parents who are being exploited (stand up Gap for Kids) but so what? They are the people responsibel for society. We all are. Is it really that adults want to dress their children sexily? I think that unlikely. Isn't it more likely that if fashion dictates a style of dress that is absurdly inappropriate for pre-pubescent children, parents will dress their children that way because it's more important to them that the child conform than the cultural connotations of the clothes. Yet actions do have consequences. If you dress your child as a mini-spice girl, or SClub7 nymphet, if you take out a second mortgage to buy your little boy a pair of Nikes, you send them a message: 'You are not worth much as a child. Try to look older. Wear the right thing. Fit in. You are worth what I spend on you, therefore the more I spend the more I love you.' Children's natural attempts to copy adults shouldn't be squashed, but neither should they be exploited by a culture so afraid that it squeezes its women into the hairless, fatless shape of a child, and its straight men into an acceptable, rigid code of 'masculinity'. Children are not 'mini-me's' - homogenized reflections of adults. They are beautiful because they are children. They are beautiful because they are not yet us. Links: today@ukplus.com, Guardian Unlimited read more rants and raves |