Nipple tassels on your kids clothes???

[DBackFan]

First we have breast feeding dolls and now this. WTH is happenng?

Designer Defends Nipple Tassels on Tot T-Shirt

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.parentdish.com/media/2009/08/kidstasseltee81709slw.jpg

It's not a wardrobe malfunction.

Suzi Warren intentionally put nipple tassels on shirts for infants and preschool girls.

Warren is the owner and designer of Twisted Twee, a London clothing company some people find twisted indeed. The tasseled top has been causing a controversial buzz on the blogosphere.

Twisted Twee also offers clothes for babies and preschoolers that proclaim, "I've done f--k all day" (minus the dashes). Then there are alphabet shirts that announce that B is for Beer, C is for Condom and X is apparently for a pig having sexual relations with a duck.
Warren talked to ParentDish exclusively last night, via email, from her vacation in Spain, to explain her design:


"The Nipple Tassel t-shirt was designed as a response to my own distaste at seeing mini versions of sexy clothes on young children," she wrote. "Five-year-olds wearing slashed mini skirts and boob tubes, little thumb-sucking Britneys.

"There is nothing very sexy about a baggy, lap neck, long sleeved t- shirt for a 6-month-old. So by embellishing this style of garment with printed nipple tassels, the result is not that the baby becomes sexualized by the tassels, but that the tassels are made benign and silly by the baby. In fact the more inert, innocent and unaware the infant is, the more ludicrous the contrast becomes."

Tasseled tots might fall under what University of Iowa journalism professor Meenakshi Gigi Durham calls "The Lolita Effect" in her book of the same name, which examines the pressure on increasingly younger girls to be presented as objects of sexual desire.


Durham said a survey last year by Girlguiding, a British Girl Scout organization, concluded that girls as young as 10 feel intense pressure to conform to social pressure to look and behave seductively.

We asked Warren to respond:


"I totally agree with critics who feel that young girls are put under
enormous pressure by the media, the fashion industry and the content
of many TV programs, to be aware of their appearance, and then
dissatisfied with it," she added. "The trap set to ensnare girls into a life-time
of preoccupation with their looks is a subtle one.

"My garments are not part of this trap because they are about a subtle as a blinking brick and are aimed at parents of children too young to read or speak.

"If you are wondering who would be heartless enough to put their tiny
daughters in Nipple Tassel t-shirts, it is often their grandparents
who think the design 'cheerful.' Or the parents of boys who think the
whole gender bender things a bit of a hoot.

"Most of Twisted Twee's t-shirt designs are a response to some baffling
thing or other our daughter Betty has done, and celebrate the
befuddlement of parenthood and the idiocy of life. We call the things
we make pieces of Object D'aft. That is what the Nipple Tassel t-shirt
is. A bit of lunacy."


Okay, our final question to Warren: Say I bought one for my six-month-old baby, and I had a 10-year-old child as well. What message do you think it would send to that older child?

"I guess my answer would simply be if you have doubts about it, don't buy it," she wrote. "Your daughter is probably smart enough, self confident enough and relaxed enough to share the irony, but maybe she'd hate it and become very angry about it and that's probably not a bad thing either. Dressing a baby probably shouldn't be laden with social significance."


Now that she explained it, would you buy this t-shirt for your daughter?

Source: http://www.parentdish.com/2009/08/18/designer-defends-nipple-tassels-on-tot-t-shirt/?icid=main|main|dl3|link4|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parentd ish.com%2F2009%2F08%2F18%2Fdesigner-defends-nipple-tassels-on-tot-t-shirt%2F

[Jenefer3]

Sorry but I wouldn't buy that for my child or any of my friends' kids. I may not see it as sexual but there's enough perverts out there that would. There are cases of infants being raped by sick individuals, I wouldn't put something on my kids to help those sickos and their disgusting 'fantasies'

[Bahet]

ewww.

[krisharry]

No, I don't have a daughter but if I did she would not be wearing this stripper in training teeshirt.

[ElleGee]

Oh eff no!

[jasmine]

where would one even think to create something like this for a child? I mean, that takes a sick mind...... creating this stuff for adults, sure, but for our children, come on!!

[galeane29]

Wth?

[janelle]

How You Voted

Would you buy a nipple tee for your tot?
No. That is completely inappropriate. 90% 24,346
Maybe. It's just a t-shirt. 5% 1,343
Yes. It's funny! 5% 1,292

Note on Poll Results
Total Votes: 26,981

The comments after the article are interesting. LOL---"for the prostitute in the family."

[Mini]

I like to think I have a weird sense of humor but how the hell is that funny??? I dont have any kids but there is no way in FK I would buy these for my kid

[janelle]

The designer's reasoning is wacked. "My baby/little girl has too much self-esteem to take it the wrong way."

Your baby has no self-esteem until they have reasoning abilities and with a mother like you their self-esteem will be backward and off the wall. Poor kid.

[Jolie Rouge]

Thought I’d seen it all.

Porn star prom dresses.
Kiddie thongs.
Little Miss Hooters.
Pimp and ho Halloween costumes.
Beyonce’s pedophilia chic.

The 9-year-old and 11-year-old daughters
of Bruce Jenner swinging on a stripper pole.

But no.

The Girls Gone Wild culture has sunk even lower.

There are now pole-dancing dolls to go with the kiddie t-shirts with pasties.

Welcome to the Death of Innocence, Pt. 9,990,107.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_L6pDyjqqsvY/Spuln3NqKcI/AAAAAAAAdlQ/arcED0oOZfI/s1600-h/pole+dancer.jpg


http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2009/08/cultural-apocalypse-watch-pole-dancer.html

via the UK - Tesco condemned for selling pole dancing toy http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-412195/Tesco-condemned-selling-pole-dancing-toy.html

[gmyers]

Why would these people target little kids. Kids grow up too fast as it is. Makes you wonder if some of these people that make this stuff are pedophiles.

[Jolie Rouge]

30% of Girls' Clothing Is Sexualized in Major Sales Trend
Stephanie Pappas, Livescience Senior Writer – 1 hr 4 mins ago

Almost a third of girls' clothing for sale at 15 major retailers has sexualizing characteristics, a new study finds, a trend that psychologists say can encourage girls to view themselves as sex objects at an early age.

The majority of sexualized clothes also had childlike characteristics, such as polka dots, the research found. Nonetheless, adults in the study rated these childish but sexualizing clothes as just as sexy as clothes with only sexualizing features.

"Even though parents might see them as more acceptable [than purely sexy clothes], I'm not sure they're perceived that differently," study researcher Sarah Murnen, a social psychologist at Kenyon College in Ohio, said of the clothes that mixed sexuality and girlishness.

The sexy-clothes trend

Handwringing over the sexualization of young girls is a common theme both in the media and in the mall. In 2007, Wal-Mart pulled a pair of girls' underwear with the words "Who needs credit cards … " on the front and "when you have Santa" on the back from the shelves after parental outcry. Those extreme cases get people's ire up, said Sharon Lamb, a professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts in Boston who was not involved in the research. But the trend is more insidious than single cases make it out to be, Lamb told Live Science. "It's not just this most outrageous thing," said Lamb, author of "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketer's Schemes" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). "It's a lot of subtle little things, too."

In 2007, Lamb was part of an American Psychological Association Task Force that reviewed the research on the consequences of sexualization for young girls. The task force found that girls who buy into sexualizing media messages are more likely to experience low self-esteem, depression and eating disorders. One 1998 study found that girls made body-conscious by wearing swimsuits while they did a math test in an empty room did worse on the test than girls completing the same test while wearing sweaters. There were no differences in test-taking performance between boys wearing swimsuits and boys wearing sweaters, suggesting a link between self-objectification and shame and anxiety in girls.

In one yet-unpublished study, Murnen and her research team asked volunteers to look at pictures of the same fifth-grader dressed in sexualized, childish-but-sexualized, or non-sexualized clothing. The adult volunteers viewed the sexualized version of the girl as less competent, less intelligent, less moral and less self-respecting. "And she's a fifth-grade girl!" Murnen said. "The fact that they consider her less moral is really disturbing, as if we do blame her for her clothing choice."

Marketing sexiness

In the newly published study, Murnen and her colleagues went through the children's offerings of 15 national retailers, from high-end stores such as Neiman Marcus to inexpensive stores such as Kmart and Target. All of the clothes were sized and marketed for toddlers to pre-teen children. The researchers asked independent adult raters to judge 5,666 clothing items for whether they revealed or emphasized a sexualized body part such as the chest or buttocks and whether they had sexy characteristics such as slinky material, leopard print, or sexualized writing. The raters also looked for childlike characteristics such as frills or butterflies.

Of all clothing items, 31 percent had sexualizing features, the researchers found. Most of these, about 86 percent, had childlike characteristics combined with sexy characteristics. Abercrombie Kids was the worst offender, with 72 percent of clothes featuring a sexualizing aspect. Neiman Marcus boasted about 38 percent sexualized clothing.

Child-only stores like Gymboree tended to do well, though older girls might think of those stores as babyish, Murnen said. Target was one of the better stores, with 80 percent of their girls' clothes falling in the "childlike" category. "We think that it is bad right now in part of what is happening in the culture with the sexualization of women that has been documented," Murnen said. "We think this is trickling down to girls."

It's easy to blame parents for buying sexy clothes for little girls, Lamb said, but that lets marketers off the hook. "Blaming the parents is exactly what the marketers want you to do," she said. "They spend $12 billion getting your kids to want the things you don't want them to have, and then they blame you for buying them."

Murnen's study appears online in the journal Sex Roles.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110520/sc_livescience/30ofgirlsclothingissexualizedinmajorsalestrend;_yl t=AtvZnxTA7.Su6Ollx4Q0u6ouQE4F;_ylu=X3oDMTQ4anRrM3 BpBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTEwNTIwLzMwb2ZnaXJs c2Nsb3RoaW5naXNzZXh1YWxpemVkaW5tYWpvcnNhbGVzdHJlbm QEY2NvZGUDdG9wZ21wZQRjcG9zAzYEcG9zAzYEc2VjA3luX3Rv cF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawMzMG9mZ2lybHMzOWM-

comments

I went shopping at target last week with my 9 year old daughter to pick up some clothes, She liked what appeared to be floral skirts on a rack. When we went over there to look closer at them, we discovered they were strapless dresses with padding. I told my daughter I won't buy dresses like that for her, and even I don't wear dresses like that. She agreed and said she'd feel uncomfortable in it. Why are they selling padded, strapless dresses for grade school children? It's disgraceful. Kids should look like kids.

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I am continuosly shocked and dismayed by the clothes that people buy for their children. I pick my Daughter up from after school daycare every schoolday and some of the outfits even her first grade peers are wearing are shocking. Both in the sense that clothes are made and targeted at such a young market, but moreso that parents actually buy them and allow their children to wear them. Children are not small adults. They are children. They are not accessories to be used as advertisements of the parents status or fashion sense. They are children. They are not objects to live vicariously through or pine over youthful glories through. They are children. This sexualization encourages sexual behaviors, predation, and a disturbing creep of what used to be problems for older demographics such as unwanted pregnancies and transmission of sexual diseases into younger and younger age groups.

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Shopping for clothes for my daughter has gotten harder in the last year or so and she's only 6! Lately I was looking for some pants. Well all the jeans are decorated with gems and are cute but are stiff as a board and all the sweatpants and shorts have writing across the backside. Everything is so cheap looking that it's disgusting.

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Disney and MTV are mostly to blame. They, among others, engineered these changes in social acceptability. Why are we so surprised?

I find the Miley Cyrus and Mary Kate and Ashley clothes to be pretty tacky ....

[Jolie Rouge]

Epic T-shirt fail: "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me"
by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Manage Your Life, 22 hours ago

http://phugcus.zenfs.com/phugc/89e36882e29e4b9ae60070edabe155f2/photos/bfdedb93192f6b434c6064ea4253659c/ori_c85a5a638f8a04.jpg

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/epic-t-shirt-fail-quot-im-too-pretty-to-do-my-homework-so-my-brother-has-to-do-it-for-me-quot-2537106/

A few months ago, the Internet was up in arms over a white David & Goliath T-Shirt that read, in pink bubble letters, "I'm too pretty to do math." Then there was the one with "Future Trophy Wife" written on it.

But many parents think this one is worse.

The long-sleeve T-shirt that J.C. Penney pulled off its website today amid plenty of parental outrage read: "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me." And, judging by the description of the shirt on the J.C. Penney website—"Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is"—it seems like the company didn't have a problem with the shirt until customers started to complain.

Thanks, major clothing retailers. We struggle to teach our girls that beauty isn't everything, that they don't have to play dumb in order to be popular, that women can be both smart and pretty. But, even though studies show that girls are as good at math as boys, even with beautiful movie stars earning Ivy League degrees in between blockbuster hits, the stereotypes persist—thanks in large part to messages like the one on that "cute and sassy" T-shirt marketed to girls age 7 to 16.

The controversy started late Tuesday night, when clothing designer Melissa Wardy saw a tweet about the T-shirt and then shared the link on her Facebook page. "I advocate for girls and against this kind of gender stereotyping in the marketplace," she said in an interview with Yahoo! Shine. "My little girl starts kindergarten tomorrow... I don't want her to see a shirt like that on her classmate, something saying that pretty is cute and right and the academics should be left to the boys."

"It incorporates all of the wrong messages for girls," she adds. "Why are we conditioning kids to wear something that degrades their self-worth?"

Tired of girls' clothing that focused on "looks, shopping, or hyper-hyper-girliness," Wardy launched her own line of apparel, called Pigtail Pals, in 2009. She spent Wednesday designing a T-shirt of her own in response to the "I'm too pretty to do homework" message. "Girls deserve better products in the marketplace," Wardy says. Her new shirt, adorned with stars and swirls in a rainbow of colors reads, "Pretty's got nothing to do with it" on the front and "Redefine girly" on the back.

"There's nothing wrong with being girly," Wardy says. "I'm not anti-pink. I'm not anti-princess. I'm anti-limitations."

J.C. Penney removed the T-shirt on Wednesday and issued this statement: "J.C. Penney is committed to being America's destination for great style and great value for the whole family. We agree that the 'Too pretty' t-shirt does not deliver an appropriate message, and we have immediately discontinued its sale. Our merchandise is intended to appeal to a broad customer base, not to offend them. We would like to apologize to our customers and are taking action to ensure that we continue to uphold the integrity of our merchandise that they have come to expect."

comments

Even though I hate shirts like this... Why would a retailer have a problem with this shirt? It's right up there with all the rest of the slogan tee's that demean and sexualize girls from the age of 5... and that's not to even mention the boy's tee's that make boys think it's ok to be delinquents... But as long as people keep buying the "sassy" message tee's, manufacturers are going to keep making them.

~~~

Wow, get over it people. It's a freaking shirt!! Why aren't the parents advocating for the brother who is doing the sisters homework because we also just called him ugly.

[gmyers]

People aren't happy till they corrupt children. And there are really sick people that would just love these.

[3lilpigs]

People aren't happy till they corrupt children. And there are really sick people that would just love these.

Are you talking about the original post, or the most recent article about the 'homework' shirt?

I don't see anything wrong with the homework shirt..........my first thought about it was that the girl was just saying her brother is ugly. lol

[3lilpigs]

Tired of girls' clothing that focused on "looks, shopping, or hyper-hyper-girliness," Wardy launched her own line of apparel, called Pigtail Pals, in 2009. She spent Wednesday designing a T-shirt of her own in response to the "I'm too pretty to do homework" message. "Girls deserve better products in the marketplace," Wardy says

:lol

I'm gonna run right out and buy a couple dozen of those!

She doesn't want to emphasize the ''girly-ness'' but yet named her company "Pig Tails?" (When was the last time you saw boy with pig-tails??)

[Jolie Rouge]

(When was the last time you saw boy with pig-tails??)

I have some boys in my Scouts that honor their Native American heritage by wearing braids ... but I think they would be offended if I called them "pig tails" ;)

[Jolie Rouge]

'Human Barbie' Gives 7-Year-Old Daughter Liposuction Voucher
ABC NewsBy Mikaela Conley – 11 hrs ago

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/aiuo7xx4C1zQxlVs2UNFIg--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MzYwO2NyPTE7Y3c9NjQwO2R4PTA7ZH k9MDtmaT11bGNyb3A7aD0xMDc7cT04NTt3PTE5MA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/gma/us.abcnews.go.com/ht_poppy_sarah_human_barbie_burge_ll_120105_wmain. jpg

The UK's self-proclaimed "Human Barbie" gave her 7-year-old daughter an unusual stocking stuffer this Christmas: a £7,000 voucher for liposuction. The holiday gift was a follow-up to Poppy's most recent birthday present from her mum: A £6,000 voucher for breast augmentation.

'She asks for surgery all the time. She wants to look good and lipo is one of those procedures that will always come in handy," 51-year-old Sarah Burge told the UK's Daily Mail. "I see these vouchers as investing in her future, like saving money for her education."

Last year Burge, who says she taught her daughter how to pole dance when the girl was 6, defended giving her daughter a breast augmentation voucher when she told Closer Magazine, "Poppy begged me for a boob job, so I gave her the voucher so she can have it after she's 16, when it's legal. If she develops naturally big boobs, she can have something else done with it."

The mother says that her other daughters, ages 27 and 17, have already had work done. As for Burge, the Daily Mail reported that she rang in her 51 st birthday with £51,000 of cosmetic surgery.

Burge has reportedly spent close to $ 1 million on her own plastic surgery endeavors. She works as an event planner for plastic surgery and swinging parties, and dabbles as a scribe of erotic novels.

"Some people think it's controversial and I get angry when strangers say I'm a bad mother because I don't think there's any harm in giving her this gift," Burge told the mag. "Poppy is a normal kid who is good at sports and loves playing outside. Girls don't want Snow White and Cinderella any more.

"They want to be WAGs [a British term to describe wives and girlfriends of high-profile soccer stars], and famous like Cheryl Cole and Lady Gaga," Burge said. "I'm just supporting her and making her dreams come true. Looks are a big part of how our futures pan out - there shouldn't be a stigma around wanting to look good."

As for Poppy, she said of her voucher, "I can't wait to be like Mummy with big boobs. They're pretty."

With the rise of shows like "Toddlers & Tiaras" and other age-bending television dramas, many experts question whether girls' expectations and their ideas of beauty and sexuality are getting to dangerously unsuitable levels.

In response to the issue of the sexualization of girls in the media, the American Psychological Association created a task force.

"We don't want kids to grow up too fast," Shari Miles-Cohen, senior director of women's programs for the American Psychological Association, told ABCNews.com in August. "We want them to be able to develop physically, emotionally, psychologically and socially at appropriate rates for their age."

As a mother to a 12-year-old girl, Dr. Ari Brown, author of the book "Baby 411," acknowledged the difficulty in shielding her from the sexualization of girls and the objectification of women in society.

"Childhood is a time to learn about the world, explore, pretend, imagine and create in a safe vacuum of innocence," she told ABCNews.com in September. "Bypassing those critical life experiences and developmental stages by trying to dress, act and be treated like an adult leaves these children lacking important life skills that help them be confident and successful adults."

http://news.yahoo.com/human-barbie-gives-7-old-daughter-liposuction-voucher-160952453--abc-news.html

Brillant on the part of the clinic selling the vouchers ... she has invested over $12,000 in their business ... who knows if they will still be around in ten years?

comments

Ummm...she taught her daughter to pole dance....When my daughters were six, I was coloring and playing dolls and animal hospital. Just sayin.

...

Way to tell your daughter shes not good enough. What a horrible mother!

...

Human Barbie is who's eyes? The plastic doll looks way better than this ragged old ɥɔʇıq. Awesome way to teach your kid too. She already looks like shes the stuck up type and nobody is good enough to even be her friend. Feel sorry for the poor sap that falls for this future little ɥɔʇıq. Hope his wallet is big enough.

...

Poor thing, her sense of reality is going to be so warped.

[gmyers]

Those two gifts would have been a good start to a college fund. Sounds like mom doesn't think her daughter can do anything but something using her body when she grows up. Seven is too young for learning the stuff she has.

[Jolie Rouge]

'She asks for surgery all the time. She wants to look good ... " 51-year-old Sarah Burge

Way to give the child a totally distorted body image at this age ....


"Poppy is a normal kid who is good at sports and loves playing outside. Girls don't want Snow White and Cinderella any more.

"They want to be WAGs [a British term to describe wives and girlfriends of high-profile soccer stars], and famous like Cheryl Cole and Lady Gaga," Burge said. "I'm just supporting her and making her dreams come true. Looks are a big part of how our futures pan out - there shouldn't be a stigma around wanting to look good."

So you are teaching your daughter that the only thing that has value is appearance ... and her only talent is to be a "trophy" or an act. Sad.

This is just an extreme version of what we see