WTF: "Kids' lingerie" photos featuring Miley Cyrus' 9-year-old sister on a stripper pole?

there is something very, very wrong going on here. and this is just the surface of it.

Just saw this as I came in about something else and feel obliged to put my oar in.
Lizard, as the father of children (both genders) I completely undertsand your reaction to this, and yours too Da,n but I'm afraid I don't believe that we can 'do' anything about it. Which sorta makes commenting on it nothing more than drawing attention to it, accentuating the exploitation.
This is really dangerous territory for blokes for one thing (although the womens business arguement is not why I disagree with the notion of arguing against the sexualising of sub-adolescent children in the media) but most of all it is really dangerous territory for all humans.
That is I cannot support the argument that 'some things' are out of bounds and should therefore be banned.

The sexual exploitation of children is a bad thing, please don't get me wrong on this, but I am concerned that the scare-mongering by self interested media outlets in concert with equally self- interested politicians and 'community spokespeople' (no not you guys- the rev fudpuckers and all the other silver tongued ten-per centers claiming to be moral watchdogs) is far more destructive towards society than these images could ever be.

I'll try to explain. The incidence of kiddie-fuckers, pedophiles or my favorite name for those who exploit children sexually, 'rock spiders' is pretty much constant irrelevant to the community attitudes, except I suppose, one could argue that the masochistic types, those who become sexploiters because it is 'low as you can go' are perhaps more likely to have an urge to act out if approbation is higher.

A couple weeks or so ago here in NZ some computer repairman got caught for copying the kiddie pix off customers' computers and putting them up on the internet, selling them on rock spider sites.
The pictures were the usual infant in the bath, naked toddler running around the house joyful at the freedom afforded by no diaper etc, that parents take of their children in the first few years of a child's life.

After that the NZ media, always as eager to beat a story up with sensationalist scaremongering tactics as any other media outlets, ran scare campaigns along the lines of "It is wise to take photos of your children when they are naked?" etc.

Now I'm sure that the whole campaign, which included statements from media 'celebrities' such as "well you can't trust a geek, there is something about them that makes one wonder if they are all child molesters", has caused those parents who are susceptible to other peoples badly thought thru opinions, to actually stop taking snaps of their children unless the kid is was suitably swathed.

This is bullshit - what the guy did was awful but the response of treating every child whose photo was stolen as a victim; only served to0 exacerbate the act.

Admittedly that is an extreme example, but the point I am trying to make is that when we react against the creeps who exploit children in these generalised ways, eventually by forcing changes on society as a whole, the cure is worse than the disease.

Some rock spiders will get off on those images of the younger Cyrus girl, and of course her parents have demonstrated once again that they see their children as exploitable resources rather than precious beings that should be nutured, however none of that would change if a set of rules were instituted to prevent publication of such images, or their use in advertisements.
The rock spiders would find some other image to float their boat and mom and pop cyrus would hunt for a new equally outrageous angle to ensure their 'assets' remained in the public eye.

this is obviously a cultural problem i wish could be addressed without the kind of overreactions we can expect, like using child porn as a convenient excuse to exert more control over the internet. there are no good solutions to this problem, and unfortunately enough people don't find this kind of hyper-sexualizing abhorrent enough to stop advertisers from doing it, so this advertising technique has gone mainstream.

debs, i don't know if you are familiar with the show "to catch a predator" on msnbc, but it's a good example of how the "response" can be just as wrong as the original problem.

the show is all about luring men from chat rooms to real homes, using young actresses as jailbait. when the girl gets the poor bastard to enter the home, the host of the show pops out with cameras and confronts the guys, who usually plead, beg, and grovel about how they're not there to do what they said (online) they wanted to do.

the role of the internet is important, because it could be argued more and more men now have a new opportunity to act on fantasies they wouldn't have acted on in the "real" world. combine this technological opportunism with the cultural pimping parents and advertisers are participating in, and people wonder why we live in an environment primed for exploiting the most vulnerable members of our society; kids.

Lizard,

What we see happening to our kids is a by-product of what Chris Hedges refers to as "celebrity culture." And as our kids fall further down the ladder in terms of math and science, their minds will be left so weakened that the only asset they'll have to sell to the world is their bodies. This will be made worse as our banksters continue to join forces with our war profiteers to drive our country deeper into debt, leaving us with a land of only haves and have-nots with pimping and whoring as its only two exports.

I don't know about posting anything under this heading... talk about potential for trouble!

I doubt the sellers of the plastic dance pole are too worried though.

Here is the long rant this story inspired...

those images of the kiddie clothing are just ridiculous. who would dress their kids like that? but then even the mailer adverts for dept stores during the back-to-school season portray the preteen set as being so grown & independently chic that all that's missing is a cig in their lips

the salsa vid doesn't bother me, as it's a cultural thing - pretty tame compared to the gyrations common in alot of traditional & popular african dances

all seriousness aside, this is real pole dancing

b real-

that was some vid!

Makes me feel weak

DaveS

I hate to give what is already an "unpleasant" topic a decidedly
worse sequel. When I caught this on the BBC ticker this
morning it was called "waterboarding", although purists might dispute
the definition. Nevertheless, it's food for thought, even if one decided to avoid the all-too-easy line of argument that brutality abroad works its way back to the "Homeland". What may be interesting is that the story has been played so as to make that type of reception
almost inevitable. Could it be that our "betters" are beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of the choices they have foisted off on the American and British electorates? Could it be that the essential irrelevance of such instruments as the current Iraq Investigation in Britain is seeping into elite consciousness, just as
recognition of guilt becomes general among those (still impotent) electors?

(I looked at some of the other photos, one shows them in SM kinda rig ups - worse than those posted.) Somewhat older than those tots, me and my girl friends were caught in a strange fashion-time warp. We aspired to high heels, lipstick, curls - outdated - and / or miniskirt pop star stuff - modern. The desired apparel was strictly forbidden. We wanted to be sophisticated, grown-up, and transgress. That is all as old as the hills, and presumably a similar spirit existed in the Paleolithic.

Present day EU efforts to regulate or legislate women’s clothes are all in the opposite direction - no veils, no burkas, no covering up. This is spurred by islamophobia, supported by a faction of the women’s movement, who associate the modesty or lack of transgressive impulse with oppressive patriarchy and outmoded religious strictures (except for nuns, that is quite different - blah blah, etc.)

Society’s impulses to restrain both excessive consumption, crossing class or *other* boundaries, in matters of dress, furniture (etc.) is also traditional, through sumptuary laws. No pearl buttons allowed for commoners, that kind of thing.

Children’s dress though was generally simply regulated by convention - custom, parents, etc. It was generally coded socio-economically, as the parents bought clothes for the children. In 1880, The rich princess, the privileged daughter of the industrialist, wore lace (allowed), sheer stockings, or cute socks, so beautiful, jewels, pretty, light, sophisticated shoes. Oh how breathlessly wondrous! A poor little girl had rags.. no shoes...

What has changed since 1975 (about?) is that marketeers figured out that their slice ‘n dice targeting could include children, and that children, who account for about 25% of the family budget, were easy marks. Children could become deciders and consumers on their own. They could influence parents to spend on this, or on that. TV provides the support. To sell to them, it is necessary to invent new fashions, new ‘cool‘, grown-up, stuff. And, of course, to transgress.

So the scene for exploitation was set. Inevitably, it took a sexual turn, as sex...sells. The girls have no clue about what SM boots or even stripper poles etc. mean to the audience, and their parents don’t either (they are in it for money only, or both parents and girls pretend to be clueless, whatever..) The sexualisation, exploitation of children is not new, but its blatancy is very disconcerting, particularly when coupled with the hysteria and hypocrisy around the fear of pedophilia. (Which is in turn exploited to push the Security State.)