They're ba-ack! Slutty Halloween costumes

It's that time of year again: the seasonal freak-out over Halloween costumes that encourage prepubescent females to present themselves as sexually available. We've been over this before around here, but I think Diane Levin, an education prof who's written a new book about the sexualization of young girls, makes a point worth considering here:

Do you think there's a connection here with child sex abuse?

There could be -- we need to learn more about this. The fact that women more and more are supposed to look like girls and that girls are supposed to look like women means there's a blurring of boundaries between what is a child and what is a grown-up. These ambiguous sexual connections are going to make it harder and harder for men who have difficulty drawing those boundaries to make distinctions too.

It's also going to make little girls think that men of all ages thinking you're cute -- cute and a little sexy -- is perfectly appropriate. . . . The idea of having a pretty body at 7 -- what does that mean? The body held up to them is not the average body of an 8-year-old. That concerns me.

What's a parent to do? If our little girls, our tweens, our young teens think this is normal (which it is) and want them, what's the best way to deal with that?

First, you have to understand the nature of the problem and see how the pieces fit together.

I tend to think of kids as developing two boxes in their head: There's the pop culture box -- that's all the messages they're getting about what are the norms out there in the world, how they should look, what they should care about, what it means to be a girl or a boy, attitudes about violence, sex and consumption.

And then there's the family/society box: From what's in this box, they learn what it means to be caring, connected, contributing members of society. Right now, the boxes are pretty much disconnected.

The pop culture box is getting bigger and bigger, and the home and family box is getting crowded out. Adults don't try to connect to the popular culture except to get upset at it, punish their kids for spending time in it, and pretend it's not there. It's just so hard for them to think what to do. The result is that kids are seeing their parents as stupid, out of touch and obstructionist at an earlier and earlier age and considering them irrelevant.

We need to make the pop culture box as small as we can, and to make the family and society box as big as we can, and to draw connections between the two. We need to be there to help children make sense of the pop culture box: not just to give them the "right" answers, but to hear what they have to say about it too.

The pop culture box is getting bigger, the family box getting crowded out. How does one address this realistically? Are the choices for parents limited to rejectionist or accomodationist, re: the broader culture? How do you know when and where to draw the line?

Seriously, I don't know why parents accept for one second a predatory market culture that makes money off of corrupting their children. But they do, and the rest of us are living in and raising children in the same culture. I agree that it takes a village to raise a child, in the sense that children are socialized not only by their families, but by the social mores and customs in which they are raised ... but Caitlin Flanagan, in her 2006 article about how nice girls got into oral sex, is surely right too when she says that the village we live in today is one conscientious parents are trying to save their kids from.