Listen, y’all. I DO NOT know where the days go. One day it’s Friday and the next day it is Monday and I haven’t done what I’m supposed to do. I promise it will get better.

56% of you are very self-reflective in answering that you very well might be a snob.  Which, to be honest, means you probably are.  Not that I love you any less, of course.  21% vehemently deny the accusation, while 8% answer with an overhwhelming affirmative.  The rest of you refused to answer of the grounds of self-incrimination, and that also means that you are a snob, without question.

I would say that I am for some things, and not for others, if that makes any sense.  There are things that many people care about very deeply that I couldn’t give two figs about, and there are things that I think are important that nobody thinks of twice.  So I guess that means yes.

A school in Pennsylvania recently banned Uggs during school hours.  Not because of their blinding ugliness, but because they were being used to store contraband such as cell phones.

The United States has the highest teen birthrate of any developed country.

I’m sorry, but that’s inexcusable.

I’m going to lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the woefully inadequate “abstinence-only” programs that are basically a waste of everyone’s time and money.

Teenagers have sex.

Get used to it.

Give them all the tools they will need, including access to birth control, knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases, and you’ve got a pretty good shot at keeping someone from getting pregnant.

In the article linked to above, a quarter of the teens said that their partner did not want them to use birth control.  Say what?

Teach your kids that if their partner doesn’t want them to use birth control, then that partner isn’t worth being with.

Humans are sexual beings.  That includes teenagers.  That ESPECIALLY includes teenagers.  It’s like nobody ever remembers being a teenager.

What is wrong with people, anyway?

Last week I asked about children and their exposure to news, and 68% of you responded that it depended on the child and their ability to comprehend what was happening.  I suppose this is where parents are free to make the decision that they feel is best for their children, but I honestly didn’t see the need for my 8 year old to know about a mass murder.   Maybe I was wrong, but I’ll take my chances on that one.  15% said about third or fourth grade, and 8% said middle school. 

Today I am curious to see what you think about the newly crowned Miss America.

Raincoaster’s got a naked Anthony Bourdain…

How to keep your teens from drinking…

People find blogs in the weirdest ways…

Chichimama doesn’t really mourn making that last school lunch…

Marketing to kids is scary stuff…

It takes a Canadian to say it so eloquently…

Candy is tired…

Yes, the fashion shows are lovely and exciting, but it’s easy to forget who is actually on those runways.  It is all too common for designers to use tweens and teens to model their clothes, since I’m guessing that an as-yet fully developed body has the right structure to show off their designs.  Let’s pause for a moment and ponder the wrongness of that.

We’ve come a long way since the 80′s supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, both of whom were grown women in their heyday, and sported very curvy bodies (at least as far as the fashion world is concerned, not the real one, which is a story for another time).  But for some reason designers abandoned that look and now push a much more emaciated looking model as perfection.

Take this statement from my new fave model, Coco Rocha, which reads in part:

But this issue of model’s weight is, and always has been, of concern to me. There are certain moral decisions which seem like no brainers to us. For example, not employing children in sweatshops, and not increasing the addictiveness of cigarettes. When designers, stylists or agents push children to take measures that lead to anorexia or other health problems in order to remain in the business, they are asking the public to ignore their moral conscience in favor of the art.

Surely, we all see how morally wrong it is for an adult to convince an already thin 15 year old that she is actually too fat. It is unforgivable that an adult should demand that the girl unnaturally lose the weight vital to keep her body functioning properly. How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion’s aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.

 

Her entire statement is wonderfully written, and worth reading in its entirety.

As always, the consumer is the one with the power of the pocketbook, and it should be up to us to swing the pendulum back in the proper direction.  Because teenagers are not the ones buying these clothes, even though they have been deemed the proper vessels to showcase them.

If you haven’t heard, there is currently a huge kerfluffle going on about a Friend of Teeny Manolo, Tavi Gevinson. My esteemed colleague raincoaster wrote about Tavi’s fantastic blog long before Tavi was sitting in the front row of couture shows in New York and Paris. And writing for Harper’s Bazaar, and being on the covers of magazines and being BFF’s with the women behind Rodarte.

Which, by the way,  has apparently gotten some fashion insiders quite annoyed.

And hey, I suppose that is their right to get annoyed at things.  I get annoyed all the time, I totally understand.

However, instead of taking the, ahem, adult high road and demurring politely when asked about the thirteen year old blogger, they are instead swinging for the bleachers.

Perhaps they are thinking that if Tavi wants to “play in the big leagues” she should be ready to take some criticism, and to some degree, that is true.  But they also need to take into account that no matter how mature she seems, she is still a thirteen year old.  And they are grown women. There is a difference between being candid and just being cruel, and it seems they have no problems being rather harsh about a teenager whom they see as their rival. 

One even had the temerity to criticiz Tavi’s father:

Why wasn’t Tavi at school?

At the Dior show, trying to fight my way backstage to get a quote from John Galliano, I nearly fell over a tiny, grey-haired woman who, from the back, I took to be a septuagenarian Japanese fashion fanatic, as she was dressed head-to-toe in Comme des Garçons. When she was ushered into the inner sanctum before me, and turned around, I saw, with a sick lurch, that it was actually Tavi Gevinson, the 14-year-old fashion blogger from Chicago. She was being shadowed by her father, an English teacher, and has recently dyed her hair the trendiest colour.

As a mother of a 14-year-old, my first thought was,“Hang on, isn’t it term-time in America, too?”. Had I not been so busy trying to attract Galliano’s attention, I would have asked Mr Gevinson why he thought it was right to take his daughter out of school to go to haute couture shows, where she would be treated like a celebrity by paparazzi? Or why he thought it OK for her to model for Pop and Love magazines last year?…

…It’s all happening too fast for Tavi, and I wonder if her father knows how to protect her from it. I hope she’s got her nose to the grindstone, catching up with missed lessons this week, but it’s hard to imagine a kid being able to come back down to reality after that.

I’m sorry, but there are some things that are possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and traveling to France to meet John Galliano would seem to qualify as one of them.  I would have no issues  taking my own son out for something even less exciting than that.  The quote above speaks as sour grapes masquerading as “motherly” concern to me. 

I think that Tavi is a wonderful writer, and her appeal to both the general public and the fashion world is undeniable.  Perhaps she may not always have the spotlight shining on her as brightly as it does at this moment.  Perhaps she will lose interest in the fasion world and its denizens and move her considerable talents on to something else.

But, she’ll always have Paris.

This is Mattel’s immortalization of  Twilight’s Jacob Black.  You know, Werewolf Barbie.

It makes me uncomfortable in ways I have difficulty expressing.

Is it the fact that this is supposed to be targeted to tweens?

Is it the fact that the actor who plays Jacob Black is still a minor, yet is obviously being portrayed as a sex symbol with that eight-pack?

Or is it just that those cutoff jean shorts are so very dorky?  Or that he is wearing sneakers with no socks?

Some help here?

via Radar

It seems I’m all about the studies lately, and I’ve got a fairly disturbing one that inspired this post.  According to Girlguiding UK:

Girls as young as seven would like to change something about their appearance and half of 16 to 21-year-olds would consider surgery to achieve their perfect body, a study has revealed. 

 The research… shows that 95 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds would change their bodies, with 33 per cent saying they wanted to be thinner and around a quarter of 16 to 21-year-olds said they would consider resorting to cosmetic surgery. 

 All right, who’s to blame?

I would like to blame it all on magazines and models and such, what with photoshopped pictures of bodies that simply do not exist in nature.

But, it seems to me that perhaps we should be looking more at mothers.  Now, I’m the last one to sit and point and blame moms for everything that is wrong with their child.  But I happen to think that a girl’s biggest influence is not some photo in a magazine, but her mother. 

And how many mothers look in the mirror and constantly bemoan their flaws?  They may not be meaning to pass on such phobias to their daughters, but I can’t help thinking that if young women hear nothing but negativity coming out of their mothers’ mouths, they will pick up on it and transfer that dissatisfaction onto themselves.

It’s funny because I definitely do not have a perfect figure by any stretch of the imagination, but I have no sense of self-loathing when I see my reflection in the mirror like so many women I know.  Even my very skinny friends will complain about their “big butts” or the fact that their waist isn’t perfect, even though they have perfectly lovely figures.

Perhaps it’s time we do look to ourselves on this one.