children's "lingerie", an oxymoron?

Scandals hold up the best possible mirror to society. Through the moral, aesthetic or ethical limits that a scandal may push, we are forced to connect to the most righteous side of ourselves. Scandals are rarely about the subject at hand but about the levels of tolerance, hypocrisy and contradictions we practice on a daily basis. Recently, a french company that is claiming to make lingerie for children aged 4 to 12 years has become a subject of a lot of uproar and bashing. Jour Apres Lunes has photographed a lot of young girls prancing around in frilly underwear, tank tops, bikini tops with make up and oversized pearls on. They are also in the heels of a controversial photo shoot in French Vogue. Whats the problem? Well, television pundits, bloggers and critics seem to find these young girls overly sexualized and their adult-like, flirtatious stances have been deemed "a pedophile's dream."
 

While it seems like the perfect opportunity to vent at the French and their loose sexual mores, it is also time to reflect on something France's most prolific philosopher once wrote. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes has a small vignette on Toys where he observes, "All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size." He argues that toys prepare and embed the child into an adult world from the earliest possible stage. We turn our children into consumers, not creators or innovators. In every single culture in the world, nothing could be farther from the truth.


Young girls are being indoctrinated into being sexy young things from as little as one year old. Whether its movies about wide-eyed princesses or the joy at her love for shoes or the delight in her daily fashion parade, we are constantly consuming and projecting upon our little girls an amazingly shallow, sexist and disempowering mode of seeing themselves. Everywhere we look, there are young girls posing like Beyonce or Miley Cyrus or whomever is the latest pop diva. Why then so much anger against the French ad? What is it that puts it over the edge - the bouffant? the pearls? the clearly flirtatious glances at the camera? It is hardly all that much more sexual than everything else around us. In its defense, they evoke the private world of young girls playing in their mothers' closet, trying on her jewellery and make-up. They are quite beautiful and tap into something nostalgic about childhood precisely because of the oversized bouffants and ill-fitting pearls. 

Is the Vogue photo shoot and the concept of children's "lingerie" eerie and disconcerting? Absolutely. But I find ALL of it very difficult to digest; from the pink handbags at Claires to the ruffled bikinis girls wear in the water fountains to the skinny jeans for toddlers. There is nothing in this ad that does not regurgitate the same exact code of objectifying our young girls as everywhere else. The lingerie company merely pushes our limits of how we see ourselves. Suddenly, it hyper-manifests all the stuff we have been sanctioning all along. The actual problems are so much deeper. And there is not even a whiff of a debate anywhere that could allow us to embark on trying to fix the existing issues confronting children today.