Things That Make Me Say "Fuck" A Lot

Shopping for clothes for my daughter is starting to piss me the fuck off. Seriously.

For one, she is two years old. Two. She will be three in June.

However, the shorts for girls her age are already practically cut-into-their-ass short, where shorts for boys her age are longer and less form-fitting. Why in hell do people think that two-year-old girls should be wearing shorts that come up to their ass and are form-fitting? What the shit?

I also noticed, for the first time, how the girls' baby clothes always say things like "sweet" and "cutie" and general cuteness like that, with flowers and sunshine and butterflies and stuff (that I do like, and is it just me or do they have way fewer prints, too?!), but boys' clothes seem to have building stuff and trucks and cool animals and bugs and dinosaurs and active things, like you need to go ahead and reassure everyone around you that you'll raise your daughter to be a passive fucking flower and won't give her any illusions of getting to wear or associate herself with anything as cool as a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Shit, this pisses me off. No, I'm not in the mood to make an articulate, clean, four-letter-word-free case for not insisting on gendering our kids from the womb on, because this is bullshit and I shouldn't have to.

Then. THEN! Freaking then! Why! In Hell! Are we! Selling! Our Daughters! Bikinis! Before! They! Hit! PUBERTY!

I am not a prude, people. Seriously; this blog is about the cleanest version of communication I generally muster; in mixed company I'm a menace and it's not infrequent that people end up spitting out drinks when I tell them how I really feel about things. I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with women wearing whatever the hell they want to wear whenever the hell they want to wear it; however, I do think that these choices are often influenced by patriarchal forces, whether outright or subconscious. Sometimes you wear the miniskirt because you like the breeze between your thighs, sure, but sometimes you wear it because it's nice to have dudes think you look hot; whatever - it's your damn body, and you don't have to justify your clothing choices to me, nor do your clothing choices justify anyone entering your personal space without your consent.

But these are kids, little girls, and we're already teaching them to show as much skin as possible, without their having the age and life experience to comprehend that males will read this as availability. Period. It's not the showing of skin - because I think we're stupidly obsessed with skin, whether it's shown or hidden, and we need to get the fuck over the human body already; it's not like we haven't had it since humans have existed, for fuck's sake - but we're taking little girls and sexualizing them, because our culture is sick and stupid and sees skin as sexual, and we are refusing to take that into account whenever we give our eight-year-old the bikini without explaining to her that the only reason it exists in the first place is because it looks hot to guys, because, seriously, the shit is uncomfortable, people. Why are we trying to make little girls hot?

Little girls do not have breasts; there is no reason that half the selection of shirts I see in the girls' section are cut very similarly to some of my skimpier shirts - and I wear fairly skimpy stuff on top because it's my damn body, so step. Little girls do not have breasts. Why do I have to explain this?

Why is it that I had a ten-year-old girl at the daycare who had makeup and told me that it made her look sexy? And that she reassured me, whenever I was clearly horrified, that "sexy" isn't a bad word, without understanding that my horror isn't at the word; it's at it being applied, ever, to a prepubescent girl, and that, worse, it was positioned so that she would learn to apply the word to herself as if it were positive?!

I mean, dude, people, your kids will have plenty of time to be sexy and for you to be horrified about it; please stop either pushing it on them or letting them try to be it whenever they are too young to understand that the word "sexy" implies something they are not ready for. I don't hear little boys saying they want to be sexy.

I am not horrified by the fact that someday my daughter will be sexual. I expect it. Hell, as long as it's within healthy, consensual relationships, I'm pleased, because, if she is within that context, I have done my job right. I don't understand why we have this holy terror of sexuality in our culture (while simultaneously pushing it everywhere, as long as it's women who are the objects). I have never found sex to be an embarrassing topic, and, when she's old enough, it's her world, her body, her choices, awesome. But I'm sorry - I refuse to even begin to push on my daughter that she should look like a sex object before she even knows what a sex object is. As if these little girls know what it means when they walk around with shorts on with the word "juicy" on their damn asses. Their parents should be slapped.

This is so fucking stupid, and it pisses me off that it's even prevalent enough that I've noticed it.