Some days ago I read an article in the paper. A picture next to the article was of a female hardly wearing any clothes.
Nothing wrong with that right? Every single newspaper has that...right?
Right. But there was something really disturbing about this particular picture and also what was written by the mother. The fact that the female was 14 years old. The article was an interview with her mother letting her dress that way. Even though she said this:-
"I don't want my daughter to dress like this but feel like I have no choice and on this particular occasion she had manipulated a set of circumstances that made it incredibly difficult for me to put my foot down".
I wasn't sure at first if I should put the following picture up on my blog post but it had been in a national newspaper so here it is:-
She isn't even fully grown for crying out loud.
I'm not a parent. I may never be a parent. I don't know whether I would be a good father if that time ever did come. But I really could not believe what I was reading. This is a 14 year old girl with hardly any clothes on. I'm not saying it is easy to be a good parent and I am not saying I would know what the right thing to say or do would be if my 14 year old daughter dressed like this. But one thing I do know is that there is no way I would actually let my 14 year old daughter go out dressed like that EVER. I would not care about wanting to be cool, I would not feel any pressure and I definitely wouldn't feel like I was manipulated where I couldn't put my foot down. Also I wouldn't care about her thinking I was "prude" and "out of touch with fashion" which is what this mother thought her daughter might feel about her. I would like to think that I would raise my daughter to not want to dress like a slut. Which brings me onto the next bit of the article.
The mother looked on her daughters' social networking accounts after the daughter had "accidentally" left her computer on. Apparently the mother was "horrified" to learn that her daughter was being "slut-shamed". Now I hadn't even heard of the term "slut-shamed" until I carried on reading.
Apparently, it's a "new thing" where anonymous people can go onto some sort of page or website and condemn you for how you look. Yeah I know-fucking crazy. And you won't be surprised to hear that 2 girls have already committed suicide after being "cyber bullied" from this. As stated somewhere on this blog before, I find cyber bullying absolutely unbelievable. If you are the victim of cyber bullying, all you have to do is not look/not care at whatever it is that is written about you. Don't log on and read! Use the internet for the million of other things it's there for.
Anyway, some comments that this 14 year old received that her mother read were "Are you dressing yourself like that so boys will want to sleep with you?", "You think you're sexy but you're just a cheap slut". The girl replied "You don't know me so you can't judge me".
I'm not saying people should be commenting like this-of course they shouldn't. In fact, these kinds of sites should not even exist but the problem is that they do exist. And for a 14 year old girl to dress like this-it's bound to attract negative comments. Only an absolute idiot would say something positive about this dress sense. An idiot or a paedophile. And that's a whole other problem with dressing like this-it will attract paedophiles. One of the reasons I was very wary about posting the picture of her. But as I said, it has been in a national newspaper and I wanted to point out the horror of it, NOT do what the mother is doing and try to understand it.
Understanding it isn't going to repel the sick people that are out there.
Unfortunately with so many disgusting sites that anyone can get access to on the internet, a paedophile can easily get access to her picture and remain anonymous and you would never know who that was unless he attacked her. There was some guy I used to know who went to my college. He used to "joke" about rape and paedophilia quite freely which I found disgusting. He only ever seemed to do it when a couple of his male friends were around. Obviously never when females were around. He was actually a nice guy when females were around. I don't speak to him or look at him ever because of these disgusting remarks that he continually made in the absence of females. Ironically this man went on to become a teacher. At a high school. Even more ironically, this man is now seeing a woman who was a victim herself when she was 14 years old. I wonder if the people who employed this man to be a teacher for children would have employed him if they knew what he used to say? Of course they wouldn't. I wonder if the girl would be with him if she knew some of the utterly sick, disgusting and disturbing things he talked about? Of course she wouldn't. My point with this is that there are an awful lot of things like this not just being said, but actually being done and it's so horrific as things like this ARE happening everywhere. Several cases are on the news right now. And there are so many disgusting people out there-people who you wouldn't expect to be dangerous. But are.
Yes it's difficult for young girls if all their friends dress like this too. It's not easy when pop stars who I have mentioned in my blog before also dress like this and little girls look up to them as their role models. But it does not mean a parent should put up with or let their underage daughter dress like this. It is wrong. This particular girl and her mother apparently both agree that it is a "current teenage phenomenon" to dress like this.
Well if that is the case, then start a new phenomenon and start that by wearing clothes. Make others follow and respect you. You can do this with wearing clothes. And any parent who lets her underage daughter dress like this should be ashamed no matter what the circumstances.
