Seriously, let's bring on the Usborne Feminine Mystique

Angry Pregnant Lawyer has a great, blistering post sparked by a Washington Post article on Club Libby Lu. For those of you, like me, who live under a rock as far as hip retail developments are concerned, Club Libby Lu is all about developing your little daughter's inner Paris Hilton. Your baby girl can have hair extensions, eye makeup, and painted fingernails, and then pour her baby body into a "rock star" costume featuring halter tops that are barely there. Here's the quote that really, really made my skin crawl:

Sometimes people walking through the mall gather by the windows at Club Libby Lu to watch the spectacle of little girls: all that pink and glitter. All that flesh, too.

A woman passing by says to three blondes in tight outfits, the youngest of whom is 4: "If you're wearing those kind of clothes, you gotta shake your booty."

The girls look at her blankly.

Isn't that great? Coming soon to your local mall, a place that's all about teaching your baby girls how to shake it like the objectified sexbots they're destined to be. And don't think you're protected because you don't live in the hippest, wealthiest towns. This ain't only aimed at upscale markets. There's one in Syracuse, one in Albany, one in Poughkeepsie. The Connecticut one is in Manchester, not Greenwich or West Hartford. The Ohio one is in Columbus, not Shaker Heights. This is big, baby. It's not just for conspicuous consumption freaks: it's for you, and you, and you. Come live out your sexbot fantasies as they are embodied in the flesh of little girls eight and under! You can bring all your little friends there for birthday parties! It's a real mother/daughter bonding experience! And a ped0phile's dream come true!

Between this and the recent brouhaha about "false advertising" (which I'm trying really, really hard not to touch, because I know some of y'all are friends with the blogger who started it all, and besides, Twisty already said it better than I ever could), it's been a great frickin' week for the patriarchy.

I remember back when I was 20, and knew everything. I took my first women's studies class, but, like, we already knew all that stuff. It was all historical background. Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique? So dated. It was like reading a critique about the Middle Ages. Who believed things like that anymore? Those were yesterday's battes. We knew that we had come a long way, baby. Yes we had!

Well, it's not the first thing I knew in my 20s that was so, so wrong.

The only bright side, if there is a bright side, is that we had a long family discussion this morning about Club Libby Lu, and why Baby Blue will not be attending any birthday parties there in the future. Well, it was supposed to be a conversation between Mr. Blue and me, but since LG has never heard a conversation that he felt unqualified to join, he jumped right in.

LG: "Why is that place bad?"

PS: "Well, this place is bad because it tells girls that they have to look a certain way and do certain things if they want people to like them."

LG: "Oh, like they have to wear pink, and purple, and dress like flowers?"

PS: "Uh, yeah. Kind of."

LG: "Like Cassie. She wears pink and dresses like a flower."

PS: "Yeah."

LG: "I guess that's OK if you're a dragon. But why do all the girls have to wear pink? If I wear pink, people will laugh at me."

PS: "And that's not right, either."

LG: "So what happens if a boy goes to that store?"

PS: "I guess boys just aren't supposed to go there. Wow, I hadn't thought of that -- those birthday parties presuppose that little girls aren't friends with boys. It's like frickin' purdah for the preschool set. Makes Chuck E. Cheese look like a paragon of the Enlightenment, you know?"

MB: (Is unable to answer, because he's still in shock that something like this exists in the first place.)

LG: "Well, I think that store is stupid. And the people who go there are stupid."

Precisely, LG. Next up in the lesson plan: the Usborne Feminine Mystique!