I read an article in the Cape Times recently about underwear lines available in South Africa for girls under ten. This underwear include bras for children as young as two. Yes. Two. Retailers have defended the articles as "what the customers want". One of panties available for little girls had the words "spoil me" with an image of black cat on it. What kind of customer wants to put that on a 5-year-old?
The tshirts for children with words like "Broken Flower", "Porn Star", or "First Desire" are barely noticed anymore, but are a frightening example of the hypersexualisation of prepubescent girls.
Yes, girls do develop early in some cases, and yes there should definitely be lines available to them. But no baby needs a bra. And the article discovered that while the average girl's first bra would be a 32A, what the companies are selling is only 25 inches. This is not recognised in the industry and can damage a young child's soft tissue.
In a country with such a high incidence of crimes against children, why would we want to encourage girls to send out messages they don't understand? I'm not in any way saying they're "asking for it". I'm just saying that there are disgusting psychos out there, and instead of finding the happy medium between baby clothes and slutty kid's clothing, the big clothing companies are encouraging an environment where children can be exploited because they don't know any better and their parents just don't care.
No comments:
Post a Comment