Lil Suzie Sexpot

While everyone with a life is out tarting it up this Saturday night, I'm sitting here sipping on a Cab, reading news stories, and marveling at the sheer number of articles out there chronicling the pornification of young girls' Halloween costumes. Here's one. Here's a localized one, which I will not take the time to fisk (I don't find so much of a problem with the article; it's more some of the quotations — seriously, male confirmation of our femininity will stop this trend? Hmmm). Have fun, go nuts, find your local paper's version!

Anyway, the idea is that everyone's all Oh my God, costumes for little girls are so sexy this year! How did that happen?!?! And then some people are all Well there wouldn't be costumes like this if people weren't buyin' 'em. And I'm all Can someone please just come at me with a concrete donkey and hurl it at the center of my enormous forehead because I want to go to sleep forever.

The emergence of sexy costumes for little girls (or at least the current up-in-armsness about sexy costumes for little girls) comes at the same time that Tesco, the UK's Wal-Mart, has been caught selling stripper poles — complete with toy money and a toy garter belt in which to stuff it — in its toy section. Outcry. And then they decided to sell it as a fitness accessory (which they claimed it was all along).

So here we have two cases of not just womanhood, but the heavily mediated, pornified, sexbot womanhood we all know and love, trickling down to little girls, who want to be cool and cute and popular like all their TV idols (who all wear the sexbot uniform), and seemingly nothing but misguided, disgusting adults who either ignore the situation (the parents) or exploit it (the merchants).

Twisty has some interesting thoughts on this very topic:

Once again — and I wish this would stop happening, because it always gives people the tiresome idea that I think sex ought to be abolished or something — I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with prudey conservative family groups: yep, this toy is offensive almost beyond description. However, it is at this juncture that our ideologies mercifully diverge. I do not, as one ‘family campaigner’ suggested, believe that the toy will “destroy children’s lives.” (The only toy with that sort of power is Etch-A-Sketch; a more frustrating, soul-sucking, ungratifying, time-wasting blot upon Western civilization has never been conceived). No, I’m afraid children’s lives were deep in the crapper long before the pencil-dick pervs at the Sexy Toddler Toy Company came up with their sexbot training kit. This asinine pole-dancing game is merely the logical extension of the ideology generated by our global thermonuclear megatheocraticorporatocracy — you know, the patriarchy — which has been destroying children’s lives, and everybody else’s lives, too, for centuries now. Which it does through God and war and the nuclear family and high heels and consumerism and illiteracy and, of course, the violent misogyny that makes all of the above possible.

Shit, I can't possibly say it any better than that.