Miley Cyrus, Dolls Market Pole Dancing to Tweens

by Amanda Kloer · 2009-09-03 12:03:00 UTC
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The newest sensation to sweep the tween market seems to be .... pole dancing?  Miley Cyrus shook her underage stuff (what little she has of it) up and down a pole at the Nickelodeon Teen Choice awards in August, in front of an audience of kids and tweens.  And now, kids can buy their very own Poll Dance Doll.  What's next -- sexy thongs for kids?  Oh wait, that already happened ...

Marketing pole dancing to kids gross and dangerous.  Both the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana empire and dolls are marketed to girls in the 7-13 age range.  And girls 7-13 have no business pole dancing.  There's a great scene in the movie Mean Girls where the popular girl's clueless mom (Amy Poehler) is smiling as she watches her 9-year-old daughter imitate an MTV spring break show by dancing provocatively and flashing the TV set.  I always thought that scene was a funny hyperbole of what happens when children are parented soley by pop culture, but now it looks like a scary tarot-like prediction of a Tweens Gone Wild video.  Watch the press coverage of Miley Cyrus closely, and you can see the media salivating for her to turn 18 so they can find a good-girl-goes-bad angle.  They did it to Brittany and to Jessica and to the Olson twins.  And they're going to do it to Miley.

This cultural Madonna-whore complex that eats young teen pop stars alive is moving to devour more and younger girls.  At the end of the day this isn't just about a doll or a dance move.  It's about the fact that kids are being sexualized at younger and younger ages, and that over-sexualization has serious consequences.  It glamorizes commercial sex for young girls that have no understanding of the realities of the commercial sex industry.  Desensitizing kids to commercial sex makes it easier for "friendly" pimps to lure them into prostitution and pimp control.  Pimps prey on the natural sexual curiosity of teens, which has been warped and over-stimulated by a media culture which tells girls they are only valued for their complete purity or complete depravity.  And once a pimp has control over a girl, it becomes exceedingly harder for her to leave.

I'm sure a lot of people will look at this and say, "big deal, it's just a doll."  It is just a doll, but this doll and the carnage of fallen teen pop stars and the sexy thongs for kids and MTV and all the other sexy things that are marketed to kids start to add up into a pretty big pile of hyper-sexualized garbage.

Kids play in that garbage.  And we're surprised when they come home dirty.

Photo credit: Gizmodo

Amanda Kloer is a Change.org Editor and has been a full-time abolitionist in several capacities for seven years. Follow her on Twitter @endhumantraffic
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