The Clique Girlz.
With a name like that, where does one start?
Quite apart from anything else, they’ve managed to worsen an already knotty issue of punctuation. What – and this has been keeping me up at night – is the genitive form of that band name? Would one say, ‘the Clique Girlz’s website’? Or ‘The Clique Girlz’ website’? ‘The Clique Girlz’z website’?
Lynne Truss has no answers for me. The angels weep.
Do have a look at that website, by the way. It’s www.cliquegirlz.com. Once you’ve recovered from the blast of ‘Then I Woke Up’ which greets you – and the pink and the hearts and the crowns and whatever their other beastly ‘group symbol’ is – you might notice the ‘hot videos’ section.
But I warn you that these hot videos are, well, not very hot. Partly because giggling and muffin-eating have never struck me as particularly erotic – but primarily because the Clique Girlz are aged twelve and thirteen.
When, I wonder, did it become OK to call a prepubescent child ‘hot’? The provocative poses in the photographs don’t quite manage to disguise the lack of breasts; the littlest girl in the centre continues to look stubbornly twelve. It’s all very sad and rather creepy.
Granted: it could be worse. BBC Four recently ran a follow-up to Painted Babies, a 1996 documentary about child beauty pageants. One image stands out. It’s the four year-old dressed as a burlesque dancer – running her hands tantalisingly up her thighs and over her (flat) chest, singing ‘Spend a little time with me…’
The moment has a grotesqueness that the Clique Girlz – say what you like about them – do not. One could argue that the latter are at least on the cusp of physical semi-maturity. Projecting an ostentatious front of sexuality onto a twelve year-old, although still dangerous, is not as grossly inappropriate as doing the same to a toddler.
However, people reach puberty at different ages. Menstruation has been recorded in girls as young as eight months. Does that make them ‘sexual beings’?
In Britain, the age of majority is set at 16 because physical and emotional maturity do not necessarily correlate. Perhaps we should use that age as a minimum elsewhere. And if anyone still thinks the sexualisation of children is ‘harmless’ or ‘cute’ after watching Painted Babies, they should answer this riddle: how is a burqa like a bikini?
Marriageable at nine, Iranian girls are rendered sexual overnight and expected thereafter to cover up. The presence of the hijab flags them as requiring concealment from lustful eyes. Growing up in Pakistan, I remember the bewildered sense of having suddenly become a temptation – my ankles transformed against my will or understanding into something indecent.
Dressing a child in fishnet stockings and feathers essentially does the same thing – marks her body out as a sexual entity. The burqa seeks to conceal it, the bikini to show it off. The thinking is the same: the only difference is in the response.
