Padded bikini bras for seven-year-olds

A UK clothing chain, popular discount retailer Primark, reacted swiftly to criticism of its padded bikini bras designed for girls as young as seven. The product has been withdrawn, and Primark announced it would donate any profits from the inappropriately sexualizing items to a children’s charity. The bikinis were selling for £4 ($6).

The British tabloid The Sun broke the story last week and featured it prominently day after day. It congratulated itself on “a victory for The Sun” when Primark announced it would no longer sell the item. Meanwhile, its front page headlines generated considerable sales and not just among readers who were concerned with protecting the innocence of childhood. More often than not, the headlines drew one’s attention to the “Paedo” (pedophile) angle on the story (as in “Paedo bikini banned” and “Paedo Heaven on High Street.”) The Sun is known for its coverage of issues such as Don’t grow up too soon, Miley, complete with photos that encourage the very behavior the text claims to criticize.

Earn Peekaboo Dance Dollars with the kiddie stripper pole

Numerous reports on this story reminded readers of another recent sexualized item for children, the kiddie stripper pole. An advertisement for the product reads:

Unleash the sex kitten inside…simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you’ll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars.

According to KitchenDaily, the pole kit “includes an extendable stripper pole, a ‘sexy dance garter,’ and a DVD that teaches the viewer how to remove their knickers. Sexily.” Following objections, the British retailer Tesco removed the pole kit from the Toy section of its website, but it remains on sale under Fitness. At £50 ($77), it’s not cheap.

Politicians get into the act

The Primark bikini uproar happened just one day before the televised debate between candidates for Prime Minister. Thus the timing wasn’t opportune for a comment from Nick Clegg, who became an overnight sensation with the debate. The two other leading candidates weighed in immediately, however.

Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister, offered support for the Mumsnet campaign “Let Girls Be Girls,” saying:

All of us parents can recognise there’s something wrong when companies are pushing our kids into acting like little grown-ups when they should be enjoying being children.

David Cameron told BBC London Radio:

The sort of country I want is one where it is not just government (that) feels outraged about the early commercialisation and sexualisation of our children but companies should stop doing it, the[y] should take some responsibility.

A commentator at the The Guardian managed to criticize Cameron for his remarks.

We need someone who will represent the “great ignored”. Not David Cameron’s law-abiding middle England, but the lawbreaker, the illegal immigrant, the criminal, the disfranchised. Less a crusader for parents concerned about their eight-year-old’s exposure to Primark’s padded bikinis. More the champion of the workers in Bangladesh to whom the company pays 7p an hour.

The UK is a bit more conscious of social class issues than the US, and social class (middle England) may play a role in the political reaction to padded bikini bras for children. More on this in a moment.

Back off from our daughters, creeps

This type of rhetoric appears in the midst of election fever, certainly, as Jenny McCartney points out. McCartney, who writes an intelligent blog about social and political issues for The Telegraph, had this to say about the Primark padded bikinis:

It was unfortunate for Primark that news of the glittery, padded bikini-bra it was quietly peddling to seven-year-old girls broke last week in the middle of an election campaign, when the tide of moral outrage tends to run particularly high. … Suddenly the grotesquely come-hither little bras were being dangled in the media spotlight as an example of everything that has gone wrong with British girlhood. … Each time [this happens], parents – apart from those foolish enough actually to buy this corrupting tat for their daughters – respond with a flash of fury and the item is withdrawn. Soon thereafter, another retailer will go on blithely to ignore the boundary that properly separates a six-year-old girl from an adult woman.

British mothers have remained silent, perhaps for too long, only privately expressing droll unease as they noticed how their daughter’s Bratz dolls resembled miniature lap-dancers, and how the young girls on pop videos routinely dance half-naked around indifferent, powerful men, as though grateful for scraps of attention. … Out there, in campaigns co-ordinated on the internet, there are signs that Britain’s mothers have finally begun to growl at the overly pushy marketing men and women, and their growl is saying: back off from our daughters, creeps.

McCartney speaks from experience as the mother of a daughter and a son. The issue is more complex than this, however, as pointed out by someone who has the perspective of quite recently becoming an adult.

Sexualization and social class

Writing at The Guardian, blogger and “feminist activist” Laurie Penny has a different perspective. Her article is entitled “Let girls wear Primark’s padded bikinis.” (emphasis added)

The pubescent padded bra has been hijacked by the faux-feminist family values brigade as a symbol of moral decline, along with the kiddie pole-dancing kit and the playboy bunny pencil case. With weeks to go before the General Election, politicians are falling over themselves to support Mumsnet’s Let Girls Be Girls campaign, which pressures retailers to discontinue products that ‘sexualise’ young girls. Primark has become a particular focus of public disapproval, and the clothing outlet’s pledge to stop stocking padded bikinis for seven-year-olds has been targeted by all three major parties, with David Cameron declaring the products a “completely disgraceful” example of “premature sexualisation”.

There is a distinct class element to this puritan agenda. Although the Mumsnet campaign is a broad one, politicians and the press have reserved special disdain for Primark, whose brand has become shorthand for cheap clothing marketed at the working class. This strategy sustains the idea that it is specific groups of young girls who are “sexualised” by corporate culture, and specific, morally bankrupt working-class mothers who buy padded bras for their daughters. …

This sort of organised moral outrage is deeply unhelpful to young people negotiating the complex world of adult sexuality. The imprecation to “let girls be girls” imagines a halcyon age of sexual innocence, where young ladies climbed trees and drank ginger pop instead of rummaging delinquently in each other’s pornographic pencil cases. … Rather than encouraging healthy sexual exploration or promoting education, campaigns to protect girls from “sexualisation” assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.

The notion of “sexualisation” deserves serious critical unpacking. … The online mumocracy’s call for retailers to “show parents that their company believes that children should be allowed to be children” is irrelevant to the real experiences of girls growing up in a world where our sexual impulses are stolen and sold back to us.

Padded bras for preteens are not the problem. The problem is a culture of prosthetic, commodified female sexual performance, a culture which morally posturing politicians appear to deem perfectly acceptable as long as it is not ‘premature’. By assuming that sexuality can only ever be imposed upon girl children, campaigns to ‘let girls be girls’ ignore the fact that late capitalism refuses to let women be women – at any age.

Kind of makes the morally outraged critics look a bit superficial, doesn’t it.

A sympathetic text along similar lines -10 years old now but still very much worth reading – is Carol Siegel’s New Millennial Sexstyles.

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