Tricks and Tarts

**Warning! Potentially unpopular statements to follow.**

So today is Halloween, perhaps my favorite holiday. Unfortunately this year it is a little subdued because it is on a Wednesday and because, due to this silly daylight savings time change, it's probably still going to be light out for at least the first hour of trick or treating. So, I'm not putting much effort in this year other than passing out candy. Still I always look forward to the media's annual scare-a-thon where they try to convince us all how dangerous Halloween is.

This year, the focus seems to be on pedophiles and skimpy pre-teen costumes like the ones pictured in this post. I've seen several stories questioning why costumes for young girls are getting sexier every year and how we're ruining children with this trend and how the pedophiles are simply salivating at their doors. Once again everyone tries to boil complex social behaviors down to a single cause blaming television or Britney Spears or Bratz dolls. The truth is that the sexualization of younger and younger girls in our country is happening, I believe, for a lot of reasons and some of those people don't want to hear about.

First, let's remember that it has really only been since the industrial revolution that childhood has lasted so long. Prior to that, it was not uncommon for 13 and 14 year old girls to be married or for girls to begin having children as soon as they were biologically able to do so. Societies that have a higher standard of living basically started extending childhood once children were no longer needed to perform adult functions. So, to some extent, for a lot of human history a 12 or 13 year old girl wasn't really viewed as a child. I'm not endorsing this view but we have to acknowledge that it is not new.

In addition, we also have to acknowledge that teen and pre-teen girls today do not look or act like they did a generation ago. When I was in primary school, some girls played with Barbie dolls into junior high. Today most girls don't play with dolls much past entering elementary. If you look back at my yearbooks, most girls didn't highlight their hair, get manicures, or wear stomach-bearing outfits. Today's girls dress older and they spend as much money and time on hair and makeup as adult women. Consequently, even some pre-teens look more like mini-women than little girls.

If you combine this with the fact the both boys and girls are simply maturing biologically faster than ever, I think you can start to see why society sometimes forgets these are kids. When I left elementary school for junior high, most girls were stereotypically skinny, almost gangly, with boyish figures. There were only a few girls with boobs and trust me, we guys knew them by name. In today's elementary schools you'll find girls who wear larger bras than their mothers. The age of onset of menstruation has dropped by a couple of years in the last few decades. The fact is that young girls and boys don't just look older than they used to, they are older.

Now, none of this makes it okay to sexualize a 10 year old girl. But if you take the sum of these biological and social changes and add these to a culture that already obsessively values youth, it doesn't surprise me that we're seeing young girls held up as sexual objects. Increasingly they fit the mold of what is considered sexy in this country: flawless skin, thin but curvaceous, innocent but naively flirtaceous, etc. And many parents spend a lot of time and money trying to make their little girls as pretty as possible.

In the end, I don't think there's much we can do about this. It seems unlikely we'll do anything to counteract the effects of steroids in food and high calorie-high protein diets that may be helping to make our population larger and truncate childhoods. Parents could stop buying sexy clothes and Halloween costumes for their girls but this never seems to happen either. You hear a lot of complaining from parents but they end up allowing their kids to wear whatever they want. So, in the final analysis, I doubt that there's much that can be done about any of this. If we really want to protect children, then we have to have the will to be unpopular, to make the tough decisions for them, to not be their friend, and to be exceptionally harsh to those who hurt them. If we would do these things, then maybe we wouldn't have to worry so much about costumes or even sending our kids to school with unstable teachers. But the fact that we don't do these things makes me again question how much we really care.