Antique Dress: Bikinis Girls

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Bikini Girl Slams

For one brief moment during Wednesday night's "American Idol" finale, it seemed as if Kara DioGuardi and Katrina "Bikini Girl" Darrell had settled their feud when they performed Mariah Carey's "Vision of Love" together.

However, on Friday (May 22), Darrell gave an interview slamming DioGuardi for baring her bikini at the end of their performance. "I don't think she got the reaction she was hoping for. I think she probably thought I would cry or get mad, and I didn't — I played it off," Darrell told RadarOnline.com. "Looking back at the tape, she just made herself look stupid; she didn't make me look stupid."

Darrell also claimed that "Idol" producers cut off her mic when DioGuardi surprised her onstage. "I knew there were 100 million viewers, so I couldn't cry," she said. "I couldn't get mad. I just had to smile and deal with it. The show producers kind of said, 'I'm sorry.' I think they tested me. I think I did really well, considering all that I went through."

After the show, Darrell said her little sister had a nasty run-in with DioGuardi backstage. "We were walking, and [Kara] said, 'Oh, sweetie, I hope you didn't take anything personally,' " Darrell recalled. "I rolled my eyes, and my sister said, 'Hey, next time you try to upstage my sister, get a spray tan! How old are you — 45 or 50?' I looked back and shrugged. She kind of said what I was thinking but couldn't say!"

As for who looked better in a bikini, Darrell said: "Well, I'm not 50 years old, and I do spray tan!"

[ ... ]

wear Primark's padded bikinis

Let girls wear Primark's padded bikinis

Primark has withdrawn a padded bikini for children from sale after complaints from Mumsnet and others. Photograph: Lewis Stickley/PA

The pubescent padded bra has been hijacked by the faux-feminist family values brigade as a symbol of moral decline, along with the kiddie pole-dancing kit and the playboy bunny pencil case. With weeks to go before the General Election, politicians are falling over themselves to support Mumsnet's Let Girls Be Girls campaign, which pressures retailers to discontinue products that 'sexualise' young girls. Primark has become a particular focus of public disapproval, and the clothing outlet's pledge to stop stocking padded bikinis for seven-year-olds has been targeted by all three major parties, with David Cameron declaring the products a "completely disgraceful" example of "premature sexualisation".

There is a distinct class element to this puritan agenda. Although the Mumsnet campaign is a broad one, politicians and the press have reserved special disdain for Primark, whose brand has become shorthand for cheap clothing marketed at the working class. This strategy sustains the idea that it is specific groups of young girls who are "sexualised" by corporate culture, and specific, morally bankrupt working-class mothers who buy padded bras for their daughters. There has been no concomitant attack on Marks and Spencer's "Angel" range, which offers a similar demographic of young girls the chance to wear boulder-holders in broderie anglaise just like grandma.

This sort of organised moral outrage is deeply unhelpful to young people negotiating the complex world of adult sexuality. The imprecation to "let girls be girls" imagines a halcyon age of sexual innocence, where young ladies climbed trees and drank ginger pop instead of rummaging delinquently in each other's pornographic pencil cases. In fact, in countries where children are routinely well fed, a significant minority of seven-year-old girls have already started puberty, and most foster a natural curiosity about bodies and intimacy. Rather than encouraging healthy sexual exploration or promoting education, campaigns to protect girls from "sexualisation" assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.

The notion of "sexualisation" deserves serious critical unpacking. The term envisions girl children as blank erotic slates upon which sexuality can only ever be violently imposed. This narrow vision of sexuality leaves no room for young girls to explore authentic desire at their own pace, insisting instead that girls need to be protectedfrom erotic influence, while boys, presumably, are free to fiddle with themselves to their hearts' content.

Far from protecting young girls, the "anti-sexualisation" agenda actually serves a culture that shames girls if they have sexual feelings of their own while fetishising them as objects of erotic capital. The pornographic and advertising industries routinely infantilise adult women in an erotic context: in 2008, catwalk model Lily Cole infamously posed nude for French Playboy cuddling a teddy bear and licking a lollipop. Corporate visions of pubescent sexuality are marketed to children and adults alike as ritualised acts of erotic drag, and from an early age, young girls have a profound understanding that such sexual performance must be undertaken if we are not to be socially punished.

I would have killed for a padded bra when I was in primary school, if only to give an extra boost to the wodges of toilet roll I had already begun to stuff into my crop-top. Like many girls, I was teased mercilessly for my flat chest by boys with undescended testicles who had already discovered that the best way to torture their female classmates was to mock us for not being sexy enough. A DIY Andrex bosom offered some protection; the handful of my schoolmates who had grown real breasts had no such luck, and were groped, harassed and dogged by cries of "slut" and "slag". For young women, sexual shame is learned in the playground, where we are schooled to suppress our authentic bodily appetites and mimic, instead, an adult ideal of erotic capital.

This ugly world of performative erotic control is made more confusing by a vociferous moral lobby in which adults talk to other adults about what young girls should be permitted to wear, say and do. The online mumocracy's call for retailers to "show parents that their company believes that children should be allowed to be children" is irrelevant to the real experiences of girls growing up in a world where our sexual impulses are stolen and sold back to us.

Padded bras for preteens are not the problem. The problem is a culture of prosthetic, commodified female sexual performance, a culture which morally posturing politicians appear to deem perfectly acceptable as long as it is not 'premature'. By assuming that sexuality can only ever be imposed upon girl children, campaigns to 'let girls be girls' ignore the fact that late capitalism refuses to let women be women – at any age.

[ ... ]