the dangerous look for girls
So what do
actual 15-year old girls think of the whole Miley Cyrus-Annie Leibovitz
Vanity Fair shoot? The
New York Times decided to
ask some (specifically students at Manhattan's Beacon School), as featured in an article in today's Metro section. "My friend loves her," said one girl, "Well, she love-hates her. [And] she called her a slut [when she saw the
Vanity Fair photos]." She went on. "Is this who we're supposed to be growing up to be? I don't want to be that. It's sending a message that girls are supposed to be whores. It's like you only get so many years to be a child, and then once you're an adult, you're an adult for, like, 100 years. That's it. Welcome to adulthood. There's no turning back."
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the dangerous look for girls
First we hear about little girls
getting pedicures, then
bikini waxes, and now, at the tender age of 6, it's
chemically treated hair. The
New York Times reports that today's moms are paying for their daughters to get highlights. (Full disclosure: I was a hair model in high school, and for a good four years my hair got dyed every color of the rainbow. But I made money doing it and I was
15. The girls in the
Times are much, much younger.) Says Tammy Curris of Toadly Kool Me salon in Fayetteville, NC, "We've had girls as young as 6 in for highlights, but 9 and 10 is more the norm." Echoes Mark Goodman of Hair Designers of Hilton Head, SC, "Five years ago, the rule of thumb was 15- to 16-year-olds would come in for their first color. Now, that girl is 10."
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the dangerous look for girls
Ah, can you smell it? Sticky backseats of limos, overpriced steak dinners, cheap corsages, cheaper perfume, and lost virginity: Yes, prom season is among us. (Though to be frank: I went to the prom both years with
a gay guy, so my virginity was plenty intact the morning after, but that's another story.) Prom season = prom magazines, so this weekend, I pored over the pages of
Teen Vogue's prom issue, the special edition
CosmoGirl! Prom,
Teen Prom and
Your Prom to discover what "trends" they are pushing this season. After the jump, prepare to be terrified by the best (aka - worst) stories of Prom Season 2008.
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the dangerous look for girls
"Nothing needs to be on my child's rear end. It doesn't need to have any words at all," says Suzie DeWitt of Tacoma, a mother to two daughters. You wanna know what else DeWitt doesn't want on her girls' asses? Low-rise pants. "The pants rise on little girl pants are too low to be practical. Kids run, jump and hang on monkey bars. With these fashions, their bottom is hanging out at recess." Wanna know how old DeWitt's daughters are? Six and eight. We've said it before and we'll say it again:
slutty dressing is skewing younger and younger, with kids just out of kindergarten wearing everything to platforms to spaghetti straps. Recall how the beauty industry is
targeting the younguns also? Same deal applies to fashion: Things that have typically been aimed at teens are just being shrunk, literally, and marketed at the kids that teens are probably
baby-sitting.
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the dangerous look for girls
I had my first-ever manicure at age 19, using a gift certificate given to me by the woman I had been interning for that summer as a thank you for my work. The whole process made me feel nervous and uncomfortable: some stranger pouring over my hands, studying them, holding them, painting them. I had made it all the way through high school and my first year of college with no deeper knowledge about "beauty" than whatever I was able to discern by reading what came with the giveaways I got with my Clinique face soap and toner. (I had a
lot of that bronze lipstick, suffice it to say.) And I think I was lucky: Cosmetics companies and spas are making greater and greater efforts,
reports the
NY Times, to convince young children and their parents that they cannot live their lives without regular manicures, pedicures, cosmetics and, sometimes, full-out makeovers.
Six to nine-year olds are, apparently, the latest demographic that the beauty industry is trying to entrap.
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Jezebel
We're not sure what any of this "means", but a study done by the English Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health has concluded that Bangladeshi girls living in the UK who wear traditional Bangladeshi clothes during their childhood are less likely to suffer from mental health problems as they get older than those who wear a mixture of traditional and "modern" English/North American styles.[
