Madonna and daughter Lourdes launch clothing line for teenagers - Telegraph

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Material Girl, which was unveiled at Macy’s department store in New York on Tuesday, consists of clothes, footwear, handbags and accessories, including lace minidresses and sequinned hot pants. The promotional pictures show Taylor Momsen, the 17-year-old star of Gossip Girl, the US school drama, tangled up in chains with bleached hair and heavy make-up. This time, Madonna deserves admirationOne shot shows her in a black and white mini skirt, dark nail polish and biker boots. Another shot shows her posing in a low-cut grey mini dress and fishnet tights. It is not the first time questions have been raised about the suitability of outfits sold in High Street stores for younger teenage girls. There were criticisms earlier this year when year ten-year-old Noah Cyrus launched a children’s clothing range which included mini skirts, skin-tight Lycra dresses, and high-heeled knee high boots. Psychologists have long warned about the premature sexualisation of children and young adults in fashion and popular culture. In a report earlier this year, leading psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos said that the barrage of “sexualised” advertising and imagery, meant it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between where childhood ends and adulthood begins.

As a helpful gesture towards those of its readers who may be unsure of what an underage girl wearing a miniskirt tangled up in chains might look like, the Telegraph has posted a photograph on its front page.

On another note, "leading psychologist" my arse.

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When this kind of topic pops up, I can't quite muster a lot of outrage, to be honest.

I was just having a conversation with a female friend of mine and so I was pointing out the truth of the old adage "Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed". While she was generally agreeing, she also pointed out that weight influence menstruation so kids getting fatter might well be responsible for the earlier age of menstruation we're seeing. And she was also saying that menstruations at 13/14 aren't the same as the ones the woman gets at 17/18 or later. I obviously can't comment on that last point but, either way, menstruation was just an indication of ovulation.

If a girl ovulates and can thus have a baby, by definition, Nature agrees to her having sex. Anything else is thus societal, thus variable, thus up to the individual.

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'Nature' doesn't agree with anything, and the fact that things happen 'naturally' is no seal of righteousness. Evolution is as full of half-baked kludges as it is with elegant optimized solutions.

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Originally Posted by Benjamin

'Nature' doesn't agree with anything...

That was obviously a metaphor because i couldn't think of a way turn my sentence at that point. "is natural"/"occurs naturally" are good re-phrasing.

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And the fact that things happen 'naturally' is no seal of righteousness. Evolution is as full of half-baked kludges as it is with elegant optimized solutions.

It's a seal of naturalness. Hence, there is no intrinsic problem with it.

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To clarify: I am not saying that all 12-14 yo must have sex as soon as they ovulate for the first time.

It is perfectly fine to say "Well, my body is ready for reproduction but, as sentient beings, we have invested sex with more than mere reproduction. And, besides which, I don't really want a baby - I want to feel love for someone first and experience closeness and be loved and all that jazz".

To which my reply is: "fair play".

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Stop this slut-shaming | Laurie Penny | Comment is free | The Guardian

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The word wheedled its way into the language of women's liberation like a semiotic sleeper agent. It was seen in headlines as early as 2007, but after the Home Office report on the sexualisation of young people last February, it was suddenly everywhere, with David Cameron wooing middle-England voters on a platform of "stopping the sexualisation of children", and Mumsnet launching their Let Girls Be Girls campaign against the "sexualisation" of children by clothes retailers. So far this month, the Sun has blamed ra-ra skirts for 11-year-olds for sexualising girls, the Mail has pointed the finger at Madonna for allowing her daughter, Lourdes, to launch a "smouldering" fashion range which threatens to sexualise children, while elsewhere the prescription of the contraceptive pill to preteens was said to be yet more evidence of the increased sexualisation of young women. (In fact, as sexual health educators pointed out, only a tiny proportion of 11- and 12-year-olds are taking the pill, and most of them to control acne or heavy periods.) Despite all this talk, there is little evidence that underage girls are having more sex now than they were 20 years ago: most still do not lose their virginity until the age of 16 or 17. Nonetheless, the monolithic public narrative about the sexuality of girls apparently envisions them as an army of loose-knickered slappers. Increasingly, feminist organisations such as Object, as well as women's groups like Mumsnet have begun to use the word "sexualisation" in their campaign literature when they really mean "sexual objectification" or even "sexual abuse". This might seem like a harmless substitution, but small alterations in our language can mean a great deal. "Sexualisation" is a troubling piece of cultural shorthand. It suggests that sexuality is something that is done to young women, rather than something that they can own and control: that they can never be sexual, only sexualised. This is not a helpful message to send to girls as they begin to explore their sexuality. The moral panic over "sexualisation" assumes instead that sex is only ever damaging to young women, and that having sex or behaving sexually must be resisted for as long as possible. The problem is not, however, that young women are "growing up too fast" – rather it is that they are growing up to understand that they are erotic commodities, there to be used and abused, shamed if they express legitimate desires of their own, and taught to fear their own bodies. Once, feminists fought for a woman's right to explore her erotic impulses honestly, freely and without shame. If we are to protect that legacy, today's feminists must preserve a clear distinction between the ongoing struggle to protect women and girls from abuse, and the misogynist impulse to control and police female sexuality as soon as it develops. Ultimately, it is easier to slut-shame young women by telling them that their clothes are too sexy than to tackle cultural violence at its root. The distinction between sexuality itself and the submissive, identikit heterosexual performativity currently demanded of young women and girls is a crucial one. Only when we accept that girls have sexual agency can we ask why it is so often stripped from them by structures of violence, shame and abuse. Only when we understand that young women and girls have legitimate sexual desires can we demand to know why those desires are stolen, exploited and sold back to them by a culture that bombards them with images of perky, passive, pouting women whose defining characteristic is their erotic availability to men.

Don't agree with a lot of the second half, but still.

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