Ilove being a girl. I love makeup and fashion, and I truly do enjoy going on shopping trips and rummaging around in boutiques or other clothing stores for the right pair of pants.
Nonetheless, I do not appreciate when companies try to take these otherwise harmless female traits and exaggerate them to such a proportion that young girls are led to believe their entire existence should be based upon the premise that, as girls, they should be pretty, be obsessed with glitter and not worried about trifling things like books or grades. No, according to a large number of clothing manufacturers, girls should only worry about vitally important things, such as attracting boys.
Recently, J.C. Penney released a shirt designed for girls that said “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me” which was sold on the main website for $10.
Now, this is bad enough, but the sales pitch for the shirt is even worse: “Who has time for homework when there’s a new Justin Bieber album out? She’ll love this tee that’s just as cute and sassy as she is.”
Must … control … gag … reflex. Very rarely does a T-shirt make me so disgusted so quickly. It’s one thing if the shirt has cutesy graphics on it or says things such as “Sweet” or “Angel.” I can understand this. I had shirts like this when I was 10, and I’m guessing about 95 percent of other little girls had them, too. But this slow trend of shirts that say such lovely things such as “Spoiled Brat” is really starting to infuriate me. It is baffling parents would willingly purchase and/or dress their children in apparel that very clearly seems inappropriate or negative.
We already live in a world where almost every major magazine only seems to focus on women’s physical appearance, while hardly focusing on anything of substantial value. Most of the headlines you pass nowadays state something along the lines of “FIFTY WORST SWIMSUIT BODS” or “HAS DEMI LOVATO GAINED WEIGHT?” The last thing any young girl needs is to be wearing a shirt that not only reinforces negative attitudes about women (“Women are bad at math!” “You have to be pretty in order to achieve anything!” “Yay! Let’s all be spoiled, worthless brats!”) but also acts as a pathetic way of calling attention to the child as well as the parents.
This is bad parenting.  It is not cute or funny; it’s just sort of sad. We’ve all seen the endless parade of reality TV shows that almost glorify parents who go overboard and obsess over their children. This unhealthy attention parents gear toward their children (particularly girls) is best exemplified by trashy TV shows such as “Toddlers & Tiaras” and “Dance Moms.” Both shows focus on tarting up young girls (ranging from around ages two to 10) and prancing them out on stage, usually in entirely inappropriate outfits.
Watching the parents, it’s as if they are saying, “I don’t care! I’m getting attention from this, therefore it doesn’t matter if I force my child to wear sexualized outfits, nevermind the fact that she has yet to finish first grade.”
So, my question is, why would parents allow their children to wear something that reinforces this negativity every time they glance in a mirror? When a young girl wears a shirt with some negative “cute” slogan on it, the message is sent out, consciously or subconsciously, to every person who sees her wearing it. It’s degrading, it’s ridiculous, it’s bad parenting, but luckily there’s an easy solution. Ready? Don’t buy the shirt in the first place. I promise it’s really not as cute as you think it is.
Claire Mosley is a freshman majoring in  pre-accounting. She can be contacted at [email protected].