I was working yesterday at the mall, and I noticed something.
It was something that I had seen a great number of times, but this time it really bothered me.
I was looking out towards the escalator, and I saw this young girl - she couldn't have been older than maybe five, coming down the escalator holding a woman's hand. She looked really excited, with her brown ponytail bobbing up and down as she talked with the woman I'm going to assume was her mother.
She was in white capri pants and had on a blue and black plaid shirt that was tied up in the front so that you could see just a little of her blue undershirt, and you could see from a distance just a hint of sparkling lipgloss on her smiling lips.
This girl was holding a Hollister accessory bag. The bag had on one side a nearly naked, rather muscular twenty something man, and on the other, a quite seductive (also scantily clad) woman of around the same age. the only reason you could tell the man was wearing anything at all was because you could see the top maaaybe an inch of what I'm assuming were jeans. The woman was wearing a chiffon shirt, with one button done, and a bandeau. For those of you who don't know, a bandeau is basically the socially acceptable way to wear your bra in public as the main covering for the upper portion of your body and still maintain some level of social acceptance. She wasn't even in one of their beach pictures, so I don't know what they were really going for there.
The bag probably held some headbands or maybe a bracelet that she had seen walking through the store with her mother, and just couldn't live without.
Like I said, I see that kind of thing every day, and normally I just thing "awww she's so cute" and that's the end of that. But when I saw this girl and the bag she was holding, I was really disgusted.
I mean REALLY disgusted.
Not because of her appearance, but because that bag was in her hands.
I don't have anything against Hollister, or that girl's mother, but if I were the mother of a five-year-old girl, I certainly wouldn't want my child to be exposed to that kind of sexual message at that age. That kind of a message about what people should look like. That kind of message about how to behave.
When I was younger, I LONGED to look like the women in Victoria's Secret ads, and Hollister ads, and Abercrombie Ads.
I really did. Maybe that says something about my self-esteem, or my self-confidence, but regardless I thought I was falling short of the standard that I felt I had no choice but to meet. They were everywhere - my friends wore their clothes (things we couldn't really afford at the time, though I didn't understand that) and if I didn't fit into their size "00" box, I wasn't good enough.
And I have never, ever fit into that. In all likelihood, I never will. I'm not overweight, but I'm not a Hollister model either. I'm all okay with that now, but if I were the mother of a five-year-old girl, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure that she didn't feel the need to conform to that standard like I did. Because it SHOULDN'T be the standard. In my humble opinion, there shouldn't be a standard in the first place - maybe healthy should be the standard - but I don't know, and that's not the point.
The point is, I saw a five-year-old girl - an innocent person - holding images of our hyper-sexualized culture, and it made me sick.
It makes me sick that the only way you can avoid seeing images of random, nearly naked people is by never going into public spaces. Which is really, really hard. (And also a lot less fun.)
The worst part for me is that there are some of these pictures that are leaving VERY little to the imagination - one more inch in any direction but up and we're seeing things we never intended to see, and all we wanted was lunch in the food court!
Maybe it's just me, but if my intention were to see that much of a man, he would be buying me dinner first.
Probably multiple times.
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