Deborah Lipp

Over on Shakespeare’s Sister we were having this conversation about girls clothing, and Sis said the point I was making could be a whole other post, so here’s a post.

The original topic was about how Certain Forces In Our Culture™ try to confine girls by accusing them of slutitude whenever they wear anything revealing. But Geez Louise, is it really better to force them into slutitude?

If you haven’t been in a girls’ clothing department recently, I encourage you to be shocked and appalled. The [male] clothing manufacturers are genuinely getting mileage dressing girls as sluts, marketing sluttiness as a commodity. Not just sluttiness, also frilliness, ridiculously-girliness, and the like.

There is no simplicity to be had in most girls’ departments, no jeans without curlicues and flowers and sequins, no t-shirts without some sort of I Am A Slut slogan plastered across it.

One time I was in some store (I think Sears) looking for clothes for my son. And there was this cool line of girl’s clothes with a label like “Just Me,” marketed specifically to an unfrilly girl. How I know this is that the staff had shelved it in the boys’ department. They saw NO pink flowers and assumed it was for boys.

Kids R Us, Sears, Kohl’s, it doesn’t matter; even toddler’s sizes look like stripper wear.

Another time recently, I was buying my son new tap shoes, and I was asking the dancewear store manager about appropriate boy’s dance clothing. She started to say there were unisex clothes on the girl’s rack, and then changed her mind; the shorts now are too short, the shirts ride too high, the asses have sayings across them.

Let’s get real, here. We’re not overcoming the patriarchy by dressing our daughters as sluts. We’re submitting to the latest twist in the patriarchy. We’re buying them the clothes and the Britney Spears albums, so that they think they’re little rock stars oh how cute, but we don’t teach them that some people will think they’re not little rock stars, they’re little sluts, and they won’t understand why the same culture that sold them these clothes is now treating them in a particular and unpleasant way. It’s like Joan Cusack in Working Girl not being able to figure out that her look confines her.

Is it better for boys? Hell no! We struggle to find dancewear because my son doesn’t want to dress like a football or basketball player; he’s a dancer and he doesn’t dig sports. There’s little non-Nike to be had in boy’s wear. Being a male dancer is such a no-no that he’s trapped, sartorially speaking. It’s either girls’ slut clothes or boys’ jock clothes; there’s really nothing to buy for male dancers. Doesn’t that just say everything about how clothing sets us up to be the gender stereotype the culture demands we be?

Clothing stores are much more polarized than they were twenty years ago. As the old fogeys say, when I was a kid, it was different. Of course, I was a kid in the seventies, and “hippie” was a unisex look. I was successfully able to deny my sexuality well past the age when I was actually having sex. And that was comfortable for me.

Nowadays, there’s simply no such thing as unisex clothing. Girls have to stand in the slut corner, boys have to stand in the jock corner, and woe be unto you if you don’t want to be a stereotype.

I don’t know for a fact if the slut corner is worse or better for girls than the virgin corner. It’s a fucking corner; I’d like kids to have a whole room, or better yet, the great outdoors.