The British tabloid The Sun broke the story last week and featured it prominently day after day. It congratulated itself on "a victory for The Sun" when Primark announced it would no longer sell the item. Meanwhile, its front page headlines generated considerable sales and not just among readers who were concerned with protecting the innocence of childhood. More often than not, the headlines drew one's attention to the "Paedo" (pedophile) angle on the story (as in "Paedo bikini banned" and "Paedo Heaven on High Street.") The Sun is known for its coverage of issues such as Don't grow up too soon, Miley, complete with photos that encourage the very behavior the text claims to criticize.

Numerous reports on this story reminded readers of another recent sexualized item for children, the kiddie stripper pole. An advertisement for the product reads:

Unleash the sex kitten inside...simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go! Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars.

According to KitchenDaily, the pole kit "includes an extendable stripper pole, a 'sexy dance garter,' and a DVD that teaches the viewer how to remove their knickers. Sexily." Following objections, the British retailer Tesco removed the pole kit from the Toy section of its website, but it remains on sale under Fitness. At £50 ($77), it's not cheap.

Politicians get into the act

The Primark bikini uproar happened just one day before the televised debate between candidates for Prime Minister. Thus the timing wasn't opportune for a comment from Nick Clegg, who became an overnight sensation with the debate. The two other leading candidates weighed in immediately, however.

Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister, offered support for the Mumsnet campaign "Let Girls Be Girls," saying:

All of us parents can recognise there's something wrong when companies are pushing our kids into acting like little grown-ups when they should be enjoying being children.

David Cameron told BBC London Radio:

The sort of country I want is one where it is not just government (that) feels outraged about the early commercialisation and sexualisation of our children but companies should stop doing it, the[y] should take some responsibility.

A commentator at the The Guardian managed to criticize Cameron for his remarks.

We need someone who will represent the "great ignored". Not David Cameron's law-abiding middle England, but the lawbreaker, the illegal immigrant, the criminal, the disfranchised. Less a crusader for parents concerned about their eight-year-old's exposure to Primark's padded bikinis. More the champion of the workers in Bangladesh to whom the company pays 7p an hour.

The UK is a bit more conscious of social class issues than the US, and social class (middle England) may play a role in the political reaction to padded bikini bras for children. More on this in a moment.

Back off from our daughters, creeps

This type of rhetoric appears in the midst of election fever, certainly, as Jenny McCartney points out. McCartney, who writes an intelligent blog about social and political issues for The Telegraph, had this to say about the Primark padded bikinis:

It was unfortunate for Primark that news of the glittery, padded bikini-bra it was quietly peddling to seven-year-old girls broke last week in the middle of an election campaign, when the tide of moral outrage tends to run particularly high. ... Suddenly the grotesquely come-hither little bras were being dangled in the media spotlight as an example of everything that has gone wrong with British girlhood. ... Each time [this happens], parents - apart from those foolish enough actually to buy this corrupting tat for their daughters - respond with a flash of fury and the item is withdrawn. Soon thereafter, another retailer will go on blithely to ignore the boundary that properly separates a six-year-old girl from an adult woman.

British mothers have remained silent, perhaps for too long, only privately expressing droll unease as they noticed how their daughter's Bratz dolls resembled miniature lap-dancers, and how the young girls on pop videos routinely dance half-naked around indifferent, powerful men, as though grateful for scraps of attention. ... Out there, in campaigns co-ordinated on the internet, there are signs that Britain's mothers have finally begun to growl at the overly pushy marketing men and women, and their growl is saying: back off from our daughters, creeps.

McCartney speaks from experience as the mother of a daughter and a son. The issue is more complex than this, however, as pointed out by someone who has the perspective of quite recently becoming an adult.

Sexualization and social class

Writing at The Guardian, blogger and "feminist activist" Laurie Penny has a different perspective. Her article is entitled "Let girls wear Primark's padded bikinis."

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. ...

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. ... 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 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.

Kind of makes the morally outraged critics look a bit superficial, doesn't it.

A sympathetic text along similar lines -10 years old now but still very much worth reading - is Carol Siegel's New Millennial Sexstyles.

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The article includes explanations for the recent increase in obesity, observations on contempt for the obese (including "fat porn" TV shows), acknowledgement that weight loss is not simply a matter of will power, and an assessment of the political obstacles that make solving this important problem so difficult.

First, a video that accompanies the article:

Obesity: Is it due to lack of willpower or environmental factors?

[T]he debate on how to deal with obesity remains frozen. On one side are the proponents of individual responsibility, who believe that fat people suffer from a surplus of self-indulgence and a shortage of willpower. On the other are people who believe that Americans are getting fatter because of powerful environmental factors like cheap corn, fast food, and unscrupulous advertising. Each side is held in political check by the other, and both have advocated unrealistic solutions: diets and exercise programs and miracle drugs that don't work versus massive, and in many cases punitive, government interventions that are politically impossible.

If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale "willpower versus the food-industrial complex" debate. We need to understand what causes obesity, and what can really address it. And we need to try everything from rezoning fast-food restaurants and restricting food advertising to supporting new treatments and rewriting insurance policies. We won't summon the collective will to take these steps until we recognize that our attitudes toward obesity are as unhealthy as the condition itself. We don't want to look at fat people, much less pay for their medical care; we don't want to be contaminated by them. But if we want fewer fat people in our midst, then we, as a nation, must start by treating them without condescension or contempt, and recognize the real obstacles that stand between them and better health.

The poor and their children are the most vulnerable

[M]ost fat people aren't like me: as an upper-middle-class professional, I could draw on plenty of resources in my battle against weight. The people most vulnerable to obesity, however, do not have access to healthy food, to role models, to solid health-care and community infrastructures, to accurate information, to effective treatments, and even to the time necessary to change their relationship with food. And if that is true for fat adults, it is even more true for fat children, many of whose choices are made for them. Their vulnerability to obesity is much more the result of societal inequalities than of any character flaw. Indeed, for all the attention paid to fat's economic costs, the epidemic's toll on children is a stark reminder of its moral dimension. Without some form of intervention, researchers worry, large numbers of black and Hispanic children in the United States will grow up overweight or obese and lead shorter, less fulfilling lives. Is that a legacy we want to live with?

Why the recent increase in obesity?

Over the past two decades, as the U.S. economy shed manufacturing jobs, work has become more sedentary for many people; the decline in the real minimum wage and thus labor costs (which account for one-third of the cost of fast food) has made that Happy Meal even happier; and the pressures and distractions of modern life have driven us away from our hearths and off to T.G.I. Friday's. The average American spends half of his or her food budget outside the home, and the concept of a "regular" mealtime--which correlates with healthful body weight--has been consigned to the dustbin of Nick at Nite sitcoms. ... Portion sizes have increased at restaurants and at home. ...

Food companies like to keep us happy, and they've figured out which molecular combinations make our mouths water. Cheaply manufactured, energy-dense, sugary and salty snacks now crowd our refrigerators and pantries. David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has written a book, The End of Overeating, that accuses the food industry of manipulating the levels of sugar, salt, and fats in food in order to create a neurochemical addiction. Over time, these "hyperpalatable" foods change our brain chemistry in ways that make us overeat. Other researchers have discovered that withholding sugar from rats seems to bring on symptoms similar to those produced by drug withdrawal. Food companies have also done their best to turn food into entertainment. ... "It's socially acceptable to eat at any time. That wasn't the case four or five decades ago." ... over the past several decades, fresh-fruit and vegetable prices have risen significantly while prices for sugary processed foods have dropped. ...

[J]ust being an American can naturally lead you to be obese: obesity is an almost inevitable consequence of living with our cultural norms, our history of agricultural production and subsidies, our long-standing socioeconomic inequalities, and the impact of technology on our behavior and bodies. Against this formidable dynamic, America has erected two lines of defense: name-calling, and hectoring about diet and exercise.

"Fat porn" and the ineffectiveness of diet and exercise

For the average fat person, life can be an endless chain of humiliating experiences. ... The impact of "fat porn" [The Biggest Loser, More to Love, Dance Your Ass Off] on fat people is counterproductive. ... [P]lenty of evidence shows that stigma makes fat people more likely to feel depressed, to experience stress, to receive poorer medical care, to experience discrimination in the workplace, to go on eating binges, and to duck exercise. ...

A systematic review of weight-loss programs ... found that the evidence that commercial and self-help weight-loss programs work is "suboptimal." People who diet often regain more weight than they lose. ... On The Biggest Loser, contestants are plucked out of their environment and social circle, sent to a weight-loss boot camp, and forced to radically change their calorie intake and output for several months. That's one way to lose weight. But who, besides the very rich, or the very idle, can replicate the show's setup?

[W]e need to recognize the limits of individual agency, especially in the new, "obesogenic" environment that's been created over the past 30 years, and especially for those in the bottom third of the socioeconomic pyramid. Putting individual solutions and free will up against the increase in portion sizes, massive technological and societal changes, food-company taste-engineering, and the ubiquity of effective television advertisements is like asking Ecuador to conquer China. And yet, that is what public-health campaigns suggest we do.

The government can't ask someone to pursue a healthier lifestyle--to attain a "normal" BMI, to become a non-stigmatized being--if it isn't prepared to provide that person with the foundation for health granted to some of us purely by the accident of birth. "Increasing awareness" about healthy lifestyles is not simply gentle paternalism; in the absence of real support, it's immoral. In that context, stigmatizing young children for being fat is unconscionable; stigmatizing poor adults is only marginally less so; and stigmatizing Mexican American boys and black women and American Indian children of both genders for their weight is both immoral and racist.

The political obstacles

The American political system makes it hard to displace entrenched interest groups. ... "The committees with the most jurisdiction over food and nutrition policies are the agricultural committees," [Robert] Raben says. "Who tend to want a seat on those committees? Not people who represent the consumers of goods. It's the people whose constituents grow and refine the corn and the fructose. And the problem with advocacy groups is that they refuse to accept that the solution is not about replacing corn subsidies, it's about adding tomato subsidies. But they'd rather demonize."

The Department of Agriculture is charged with both promoting American agriculture and regulating it. The tendency of former USDA officials ... to subsequently work on behalf of food giants like Archer Daniels Midland gives you some idea of the extent of what economists call "regulatory capture."

Is there hope for the future?

Towards the end of the article Ambinder has some very positive words for Michelle Obama's initiative on obesity. In speaking of her efforts, a senior administration official comments: "The goal is to use the threat of regulation to prevent us from having to make regulations, which would take more time anyway."

Speaking of David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner:

Now, for the first time since he left government, he senses that the nation's political leadership seems determined not only to take obesity seriously, but to do something meaningful. And food-industry firms, he believes, are starting to get nervous--a sure sign that they will offer concessions. Momentum, he told me, is finally building in the right direction. The Obama administration, he said, is "pitch-perfect. Everyone knows that this is the first lady's priority. Everyone knows that it has the attention of the president's senior staff. And she is the best spokesperson, and the best kind of spokesperson, to help change people's minds."

The political message on obesity

... has to come from the bulliest of pulpits: a hugely popular political figure who can help redirect the stigma that brutally accompanies obesity, away from those who don't deserve it, and toward those who do--like food marketers who deploy psychological deception, or grocers who put sugary cereals where kids are most likely to see them. Those are the people who should feel ashamed.

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Calories: What are we really counting?