Dear Outraged Parents,
If you think that your Sesame Street-watching toddlers do not know that: a) Breasts exist and b) Women have them, or if you think that seeing a woman’s cleavage will cause them to have inappropriately sexual thoughts instead of recognizing breasts as a source of sustenance (if they even notice that kind of thing at all) then:
You are doing something really, really wrong as parents.
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I'm a writer, most often committing acts of genre (fantasy, science fiction, and other stretches of the imagination). You can find my short stories in many and various magazines and anthologies and podcasts. In addition to being a writer I also engage in activism and fandom -- often both at once.
You might be interested in my take on it:
http://magazine.goodvibes.com/2010/09/24/katy-perry-sesame-street-dress-up-games-and-boobs/
You make some good points. I have to admit that I was so appalled at that outfit for being DAMNED UGLY that the other aspects of it didn’t ping me.
Bubble skirts have no place in my dress-up closet.
Why is that? This is a serious question since I don’t wear or pay much attention to fashion or girly clothes. Is there something about bubble skirts I’m not grokking?
Ditto to all this.
As far as my own reactions, I thought the Elmo video was cute actually.
Then I looked up her actual Hot N’ Cold video and oh, man, that’s a big pile of meh. (In short, KP is marrying a guy, and he pauses before saying I do, and then runs off and she chases him with baseball bats and an evil zebra, and then it turns out that’s all in his mind, and he says I do, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. But it’s chock-a-block with stereotypes about men and women and marriage and bridezillas and how men are commitment-o-phobic and have to be dragged to the altar.)
But Elmo is cute.
And , I would add, if the worst menace your toddler ever encounters is Katy Perry’s breasts, you should breathe a sigh of relief.
I think that it is no coincidence that Katy Perry’s fashion choices when “playing dress-up” are sexually pleasing to adult men. I like to hope that she makes that choice consciously and willingly, but it’s really no concern of mine.
What is a concern of mine is my (hypothetical and non-existent) three year-old daughter realizing that her dress-up chest is lacking a bustier and that her roleplay is missing the scenario of dressing like a bride and chasing after a guy who doesn’t want to be caught and, what, forced to marry her I guess. I want her to live out her dreams, but I want her to live out HER dreams instead of deciding that girls are supposed to adapt to what boys want from them.
*shrug* Maybe I’m off-base and my job as a parent is to actively teach my values to my kids and not to harangue Children’s Television Workshop into doing it for me. But if a family decided that this isn’t a message they wanted their kids soaking in, I don’t think that point of view is so simply wrong that it deserves the mockery I’ve seen on the net this week.
The mockery is probably for the only attitude I’ve seen (up until now), which is that Perry is showing too much cleavage for small children. I find that dumb.
While I think her outfit is ugly, I wouldn’t call it a bustier. It’s a strappy dress. Perhaps I have a bar for sexualized attire that is way higher than a lot of people’s.
I haven’t actually seen the Hot or Cold video, so I only have the description above to go by. Having actually seen the Sesame Street video in question, I didn’t get a bride vibe from it even though she’s wearing a veil. I actually don’t see where you’re getting your interpretation of the segment at all.
You should track down the Hot n Cold video. It is very full of WTF which is both silly fun and sexist train wreck, sometimes in the same frame.
And I think it puts the Elmo video in context. I’m not certain if that’s important, but I can’t easily accept that Sesame Street made an affectionate parody of her video but that it somehow became a values-neutral song about opposites instead of a confusing mess about chasing down the guy who left you at the altar with three different groups of backup singers and a pissed-off zebra to tell him that she’s going to stop catering to his lack of commitment.
I don’t always understand the motivation to allow celebrities to come on Sesame Street and do their act. Back in my day, guest spots were James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet (and let me tell you that you have NOT heard the alphabet until you’ve heard it from James Earl Jones).
I just saw Robert De Niro pretending to be a cabbage, which was kinda awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqHfser_9_s