I'm taking a break digging through a bankruptcy client's recently provided receipts. Having found multiple "junior padded bra" and "junior thong" entries on one receipt, I asked the lawyer I work for if it is common for 13 year old girls to wear thong underwear. Since when do young teens want to saw themselves in half?

Never having been a parent of anything other than cats, I was completely clueless about such things and I think I would prefer to remain clueless.

I read the original Slate article and wanted to respond, but for some reason my computer can't connect with their "Fray" site. So...I'll just note that among the responses, several parents mentioned school uniforms as an alternative. All well and good, except that in some schools, of course, they're going to extremes as well. Specifically, in the interest of "equality" or whatever, they are mandating certain kinds of tops and slacks for both boys and girls, WITHOUT ALLOWING A SKIRT ALTERNATIVE FOR THE GIRLS! Come on, now...I'm for equality too, but let's get real! Wearing skirt-plus-nylons-plus-"nice"-shoes, as opposed to pants/sox/gym shoes, is an important part of the growing-up process for adolescent schoolgirls which their mothers and mentors should encourage.

BTW this "liberal Catholic rather likes the "Pure" clothing items I've seen to date; too bad it's in danger of turning off a lot of would-be adherents due to the sectarian religious overtones. If some smart secular designer starts producing knock-offs I predict less consumer resistance.

Compare Emily Yoffe's interesting and well written article with the crap that appeared at Salon over the weekend.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/08/27/skinny_jeans/

In which the author is stupid enough to try to put her one year old BABY in jeans that were made completely incorrectly, but titles and describes the article in such a way that we think it is actually what Emily Yoffe REALLY did write about.

The family jeans

Since high school, I'd battled my curvy body into "skinny" jeans. But it wasn't until I wrestled my young daughter's round belly into stylish, slim pants that I knew the fashion madness had to stop.

I wish Salon would stop sucking. Apart from Greenwald, I can't think of why people would visit Salon these days.

It wasn't that long ago I dropped my Slate bookmark because Salon was so much better.

But I imagine that many parents are not so lucky. Though those unlucky parents probably have themselves to blame - if you buy your daughter a bunch of Bratz dolls (which are, I believe, the creepiest things ever - particularly the "baby" ones, which look like toddler streetwalkers), is it at all unexpected when she wants to look like a streetwalker herself? Sure, kids are going to beg and whine for whatever the marketers are telling them to want, but your role as a parent has to be to find the middle ground between deprivation and overindulgence. So many parents just seem willing to overindulge themselves and their kids.

Abercrombie was selling thongs to girls at its kids division (7-14 yr olds) back in 2002 ... oh yeah, right after they pulled their line of racist Asian-themed tshirts.

You folks like to think that FARK is full of misogyny.

What FARK is full of, are people with a sense of humor, and a sense of proportion.

You should try it sometimes.

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3028825

Yikes, when did teen start wearing thongs? I just had an amusing conversation with a nephew who was embarrased because his mom kept referring to flip flops as thongs in front of his friends. "Doesn't she know that thongs are girls underware?"

I replied ' Gee I thought thongs were those rumber shoes we wear in the summer" I'm pretty liberal, but let's get a grip. Parents need to say NO! Even babies aer being dressed in the latest fashions. Uniforms are not so bad. It saves parents money, and puts students on an even playing field in regard to style and income. Students should be thinking about if they finished their homework instead of what to wear to school. Save the style for social events.Of course someone who appears pretty cool can turn out to be not so cool out of uniform.

I went to a Catholic high school in the early 60s. The girls uniform was a jumper and white blouse. The jumpers had not been redesigned since the 30s. Boys had to wear pants and a nice shirt. No blue jeans. When wheat jeans first hit the market the boys tried to wear them to school because they were not blue jeans. After about one month, we had an assembley where the Dean of Boys told us all the "wheat jeans left nothing to the imgination". Tey wer baned and the girls started using their imginations.We were allowed to wear our regulloths the first and last month of each school year, so taht quickly sorte dus out n teh social-econmic basis. When we graduatd we had a BIg party at the sand dunes on the river where the grisl burned thier uniforms in a big bon fire.. a rite of passage.I guess that is a little too tame for today's teens.

I apologize for hitting the wrong keys or no keys when I type.... I was in college prep not typing classes.

in the last ten years? I must be a cohort of Tracy, as my tween years were just over a decade ago. It may have partially been a function of where my mother took me shopping, but I don't recall any of the sort of trashy, hip-to-be-stupid type clothing that dominates pre-teen wear today even at Limited, Too, etc. When I was 11, the predominate "fashion" was functional shorts and printed t-shirts and boys and girls dressed relatively similarly until junior high and high school.

What precipitated this explosion of preteen streetwalker wear? Aspiring to adult/teenagerhood has always been a part of preteen identity finding, and somewhat sexy/adult characters have long been marketed to young girls (my early elementary years saw Jem as the paragon of cool) but it seems like only recently have preteens adopted the fashions so literally. What happened?