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Saturday, November 01, 2014

Open Letter to American Mothers
Posted by Jill | 10:57 AM
Dear Moms All Over America,

It's November 1 today. This means that if your children are under, say, seventeen, you have a ton of candy in your house today. Most of it is chocolate (or what passes for chocolate in commercial candy), because unlike when we were kids, no one spends days filling little paper bags with candy corn, wax lips, and other unwrapped candies, nor do they make homemade caramel apples wrapped in wax paper to be deposited into kids' trick-or-treat bags. Today, your kids' Halloween bags are full of Nestle Crunch bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, Snickers, Kit-Kats, Twix bars, Hershey bars, and Reese's peanut butter cups, because these are what is available at your local supermarket.

There are two kinds of kids: instant gratification kids and delayed gratification kids, and you can tell which is which by how they handle their Halloween candy. Instant gratification kids eat their favorites first. Delayed gratification kids save their favorites for last. I was one of the latter. And I am still scarred by the Great 5th Avenue Bar Theft of 1965. I loved 5th Avenue bars. They were sort of Butterfingers for would-be sophisticates. They had a similar flaky, crunchy peanut-buttery center enrobed in chocolate. And in those days, they had almonds on top. But their very name evoked something more. Instead of evoking what I was -- a clumsy kid who couldn't catch a baseball -- they evoked Audrey Hepburn in a black evening gown in front of Tiffany's, or the Saks Fifth Avenue Christmas windows -- a sophistication we always longed for. Peanut butter made sophisticated by the exotic flavor of almonds. A 5th Avenue bar in a Halloween bag was a rare treat. And in 1965, I got one. And in true delayed-gratification kid fashion, I saved the best for last.

And then a few days later, I looked in my Halloween bag and it was gone. My mother had eaten it.

I still remember the visceral feeling of disappointment, and yes, betrayal I felt. How could she eat my precious 5th Avenue bar? But now I look back on that incident as being Mom in a nutshell -- selfish, without empathy, always trying to fill the empty hole inside her with chocolate. That's perhaps why I reacted so strongly to this:



Seriously, Mothers of America, this business about sending your kids out in costume to beg for chocolate so you can eat it in the middle of the night? You can't go to the A&P? What's with that? What, you think if you take your kids' favorite candy out of their Halloween bag, it "doesn't count"? You're afraid you'll eat the whole bag if you buy your own? You're afraid the cashier will judge you?

How about the next time you go to the A&P, pick up the bag of snack-size Hershey's, take it to the counter, look at the cashier, and say "So? What's YOUR problem?" Or, if you're still afraid, go to the self-checkout, like you do when you buy tampons or Monistat 3. It took me decades to realize that NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU. No one cares if you are buying a bag of Reese's. OWN that motherfucking chocolate. Say it loud: "I NEED CHOCOLATE, DAMMIT!" Eat it in public. Walk around the mall with it. Do that, and I promise you -- you will learn how to eat just one or two instead of the whole bag. Because as long as you're sneaking chocolate out of your kid's Halloween bag and eating it under cover of darkness and treating it as something shameful, you're not only giving your kids weird ideas about food, but you're turning a commercially-made concoction of waxy something-or-other and gritty peanut-like substance into something mystical and profound. It's not. It's just a piece of candy.

So stop taking your kids' Halloween candy. If you want to, create a "family candy bowl." Make it a family project. Your kids will learn about limits and delayed gratification. You will show them that you respect what is theirs by letting them keep some to consume when and as they want to. And you can have a piece of candy from the family bowl right out in the open, rather than at 2 AM while steeped in shame and self-loathing.

Your kids never got a chance to read the contract that has the "You agree to give your mother the Reese's peanut butter cups" clause any more than they had a chance to read the clause that says "You will take care of me in my old age." You had kids because you wanted to. They owe you nothing, they agreed to nothing. The relationship you build with them will determine whether they give you their Reese's because they want to, and whether they will change your Depends when you are old -- because they want to. But I am telling you -- extortion in the context of candy easily obtained at the supermarket is not the way to ensure that happens.

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Tuesday, October 30, 2007

If parents didn't buy these, there'd be no need to offer them
Posted by Jill | 6:20 AM
There comes a time in a young girl's life when she doesn't want to be "cute" anymore, she wants to be "hot" and "sexy" -- and rebels against the creeping Little-Bo-Peepism that parents want to keep their daughters in forever. It's one thing when that happens when you're 23, as it was with me (and granted, that gesture of independence took place later in me than it does for most, but let's not go into why that is right now).

But today, when tabloid journalism is everywhere and the media tell kids that the way to get attention is to show as much flesh as possible, it's perfectly predictable that 11-year-olds would start patterning themselves after Lindsay Lohan.

So I don't see why anyone is shocked....shocked...and appalled -- to find that Halloween costumers are creating costumes for these aspiring sex tape celebrities:

Gabby eyed the Sexy Super Girl but decided against it. A friend at her Catholic school had worn that costume for a Halloween parade and pulled the already short miniskirt way up to cover her tummy. "That didn't look very good." But Gabby did like the Aqua Fairy, a vampy get-up with a black ripped-up skirt, black fishnet tights and blue bustier that comes in medium, large and preteen. A medium fits a child of 8.

No.

How about the Funky Punk Pirate Pre-Teen, with an off-the-shoulder blouse and bare midriff?

No.

Gabby pointed to the Fairy-Licious Purrrfect Kitty Pre-Teen, which, according to the package, includes a "pink and black dress with lace front bodice and sassy jagged skirt with tail. . . . Wings require some assembly."

Cheryl Cirenza shook her head in exasperated disbelief. "This is all so inappropriate. It's really disturbing," she said, eyeing a wall of such girl and preteen costumes as Major Flirt in army green, the bellybutton-baring Devilicious and a sassy, miniskirted French Maid, pink feather duster included. She'd just turned down her 13-year-old daughter's request for a Sexy Cop outfit. "When I was their age, I was a bunch of grapes."

But that was back in the days when Halloween was still a homemade kind of holiday, when an old sheet with eyeholes was a perfectly acceptable ghost and clumsily carved pumpkins on the front porch were about as elaborate as the decorations got. Now, Halloween is big business. Americans are expected to spend upwards of $5 billion this year on candy, ghoulish decorations and costumes. And the hottest trend in costumes, retailers say, is sexy. And young.

Fishnet tights, once associated with smoky cabarets or strip joints, now come in girls' sizes and cost $3.99.

Joe Thaler, head of TransWorld Exhibits Inc., runs the annual Halloween Expo for big-box retailers. He said suggestive costumes for girls burst onto the scene about three years ago and the phenomenon is so big that he's had to create a separate fashion show. The costumes have since moved to the plus-size market for adult women and now come in teen and preteen versions. Even little girl costumes show more leg and tummy than they used to. "They're just good sellers," Thaler said.


So why are they good sellers? Because people are buying them. The article cited above, predictably, blames the phenomenon on baby boomers, for all that the baby boom ended in 1964, which means that the youngest boomers are now 43 and those born in the last few years of the boom hardly constitute enough parents of 'tweens to account for the boom in hooker costumes for little girls. And last time I looked, younger parents were neither more able, nor more willing, to say "No!" to their children than their boomer forbears.

I'm not saying that kids should be forbidden to have any allure until they're in their 20's, nor am I saying that a little bit of dress-up is always inappropriate. I went to my senior prom in a dress better suited to Little Bo Peep than to a seventeen-year-old in 1973. But I'm not sure that preteen kids can draw the line between the attention their costumes get on Halloween and the attention they get when they show up in class in halter tops and bare tummies. And I'm not sure that when you send your ten-year-old out on Halloween dressed as a French Maid, you should be surprised when she learns that her only currency in this world is her fuckability. Nor should you be surprised when she becomes predator bait on MySpace.

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