Last week I wrote a post that was half dismay over the way Kylie Jenner dresses at thirteen, and half an excuse to post a truly bizarre video of “Young Girl” made in the late 1960s. I’ve been stewing about it, off and on, ever since, prompted partially by a commenter who mentioned finding the Kardashian pictures bothersome despite having been sexually active at a young age herself. My immediate reaction was a desire to clarify that I was not suggesting that there is anything inherently wrong with being sexual at a younger-than-average age. People mature at different rates: some girls are fantasizing about decidedly un-PG subject matter while others are still playing with dolls, and shaming either group is reprehensible.
Next I started to worry that by suggesting that there was something amiss with the way Ms. Jenner was dressed at thirteen, I was being prudish, or advocating an unfair sartorial censorship. I have always planned to follow the lead of my own mother, who—unlike the parents of many of my friends—wouldn’t have dreamed of dictating my fashion choices (within reason). I was allowed outfits that sometimes got me spit on as I walked the halls at school. I wasn’t permitted to do anything permanent, like piercings or tattoos, but there were pants like circus tents, plastic skirts, false eyelashes, giant platforms, and sequins glued carefully around my eyes.
My mother was a lawyer who wore mostly suits and turtleneck sweaters. She couldn’t possibly have liked everything I put together, and god knows there must have been talk about the fact that she let me dress like a cross between a Japanese cartoon character and a drag queen. Still, the only attire I was forbidden was that deemed inappropriately risque: a sexually explicit t-shirt, skimpy tank tops that showed my bra straps. Similarly, I would have no problem if my daughter at thirteen wanted to wear full Goth regalia, or, say, a dress made entirely of newspaper clippings (as long as she didn’t ruin the upholstery in it), or even a scrunchie and stirrup pants, but if she tried to leave the house in the sort of thing I see so much of now, namely microshorts and a skin tight tank top with padded bra? Not bloody likely, my darling. Why am I so protective of the idea of my daughter’s agency in expressing herself, and yet so resolute that she not do it via her prepubescent cleavage?
Leaving common sense aside (as I so often do), I believe part of it stems from the fact that certain ideas about women and girls and how they ought to dress have become so deeply ingrained that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find where they leave off and our own tastes begin. It is difficult at 30, and at thirteen, it may be impossible.
Dressing in an overtly sexy way is often viewed as an expression of power. But for adolescent girls, that power is inevitably a sham. As a culture we’ve come to require or expect an overly sexualized appearance from adolescent girls, and yet we are ruthlessly shaming about adolescent female sexuality (when we even admit it exists). The truth is that this expected display of sexuality isn’t about the expression of their own female agency and desire at all, it’s about attracting male (or other) desire. It’s not about BEING sexual, it’s about being SEEN as sexual. Object, not Subject. Think Donna Martin, 90210′s fake-breasted virgin in midriff tops. We’ve managed to divorce ‘being sexy’ from ‘expressing sexuality,’ or at least we’ve tried to, in that girls are increasingly expected to look and act in ways that attract, but aren’t supposed to want to attract anything. And if they do happen to attract the wrong kind of attention, the blame for that attraction is always on them. Girls are given all the responsibility but none of the power. Just look at the revolting Roman Polanski case—how many people excused his drugging and sodomizing an underaged girl by commenting upon how she looked?
It is uncomfortable to be a feminist and yet cognizant of the reality of what people see when they see a provocatively dressed woman. It’s easy to worry about whether the suggestion that a miniskirt isn’t the best idea for a preteen isn’t somehow antifeminist, as if you are agreeing that this would be “asking for it.” Our society seems to commend the idea of confident young women in charge of their own bodies: the girls of today aren’t shackled to outmoded decrees about femininity, like the one that once forbade women to wear pants! They are free to wear what they please! Oh—as long as they walk some arbitrary and ever-shifting line of appropriateness, that is, never falling on the side that gets them labeled frumpy, mannish, or prudes, and yet not crossing into fast, bad-girl territory, either. This, after all, is a society in which powerful women who are “too sexy” are dismissed and reduced while powerful women who are “not sexy enough” are labeled frigid bitches, where the ideal is some impossible sexy-yet-neutered enigma who isn’t “too” anything: smart, beautiful, confident, assertive. She’s not too funny or mean or nice, she’s competent but not too competent, interested in marriage but not too interested, maternal but not matronly, this but not that or this AND ALSO not-this. Subject to an entirely irreconcilable set of expectations that ensures she is shamed either way. A way of defining femaleness that ensures male power.
{Incidentally, I have a feeling that this is why Republican women are easier to elect than Democrats—because they are more likely to talk about things like family values than they are about women’s health or equal pay, because they are less likely to identify themselves as feminists, because they portray themselves as strong but not too strong, concerned about the poor but not so much so that they’ll get unattractively strident about it, or stop voting to protect the interests of rich white men. Republican women are more likely to be seen as less threatening. Of course in the national arena, any political candidate “feminine” enough not to be mocked and hated will likely be dismissed as unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. She’ll risk being seen as an idealistic dilettante, much the way I suspect Barack Obama would have if he’d been a woman with his identical positions and qualifications, running against, say, a man with the precise positions and qualifications as Hillary Clinton—all of her “unattractive” and “castrating” qualities transformed into assets simply by attaching a penis to them. Aint womanhood grand?}
Ahem. How I do run on!
I’ve written quite enough here (though if you want more, my favorite, though admittedly dated, book on the subject is the collection Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities, particularly the piece by my beloved Deborah Tolman entitled “Daring to Desire: Culture and the Bodies of Adolescent Girls”). My point, in the end, is this: Kylie Jenner SHOULD be able to wear whatever she wants without worrying about being called slutty or being accused of “leading someone on” by dressing “too old for her age” (and I SHOULD be Queen of England) but wishing doesn’t make it so. She SHOULDN’T feel like she has to dress like a 25-year-old starlet in order to “count” as female, and she especially shouldn’t feel that way in a hypocritical society that will condemn or deny her sexuality.
Most importantly of all, NO girl, celebrity or otherwise, should have to navigate these murky waters at the age of thirteen.
About Alexa Stevenson
