Rompers. Frilly socks. Dora the Explorer backpacks. This isn’t a child’s back-to-school shopping list – it’s what grown women are wearing now to pick up groceries at Hartman’s and boy-toys at Babylon Nightclub.
Sure, our nation’s busy grappling with the general failure to launch of a generation of man-babies. But as the growing popularity of high-end cupcake purveyors, vagina bedazzling and adult pillow-fight parties indicate, the Lost Boys have company in Neverland.
Modern women are educated, politically engaged and professionally driven, but increasingly they’re also acting and dressing like children, and it’s selling us short as a sex.
As comedian Julie Klausner writes in her blog, “there’s so much ukulele playing now, it’s deafening. So much cotton candy, so many bunny rabbits and whoopie pies and craft fairs and kitten ephemera, and grown women wearing converse sneakers with miniskirts.”
Nothing knots the knickers of the legion of decency like little girls spray-tanned and trussed-up beyond their years (see: TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras).
Isn’t there also something morally sticky about the reverse-Lolitas, these grown women who dress like tweens?
No one respects the basement-dwelling man-child, but there’s an undeniable cultural and sexual currency to being a baby-talking bombshell.
Marilyn Monroe got it and used it. And while they may not lisp renditions of Happy Birthday to the president, Katy Perry and Zoey Deschanel get it and are using it still.
All this pigeon-toed, blunt-banged, lollypop-sucking madness has a method. Perhaps it’s because we’re so quickly outstripping our male peers that we’re playing dumb in order to play doctor – a surefire mating strategy for bagging men who lust after adolescents.
But while Klausner and others are quick to assert that we’re all just in it for the action, this regression to childhood isn’t just about the opposite sex; it’s also about escaping reality.
Post-recession, women are increasingly the sole providers and caretakers of their families.
We’re called on to be super women, but for less pay and less recognition than our male contemporaries.
In hard times, people escape to the past. Studies dating back to the 1980s have shown visible increases in nostalgia during and after periods of economic or civil crisis.
We’re speculating about a double-dip recession, so it’s hardly a wonder we’re also anticipating a fall lineup of television shows glorifying periods when men were men and women were girls.
So, what’s the big deal if a little sparkle takes the edge off?
By dumbing-down to cope, we’re ignoring the reasons we need to cope in the first place.
Cupcakes are a sweet escape, but women should be demanding more recognition and support for their contributions, rather than perpetuating stereotypes that undermine their ability to do so and be taken seriously, particularly as they age.
Escape is a (Hello Kitty) Band-Aid fix to real social problems, and one that requires us to downplay our real achievements, struggles and selves.
We can’t have our cupcakes and eat them, too.