Sexualizing 3-Year Olds on Cable TV? Hooker Costume on ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’

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Meet 3-year-old Paisley, a pageant contestant on the TLC series Toddlers and Tiaras, whose mother got the genius idea to dress her as Julia Roberts’s prostitute character from Pretty Woman:

The Parents Television Council is understandably outraged:

“We have a serious problem when The Learning Channel features a toddler, who probably hasn’t even learned to read, dressed as a prostitute showing off her sexy strut,” says Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the PTC: “There’s no question, TV executives are complicit in robbing these small kids of their childhood. For years we’ve seen adult sexuality being inappropriately and aggressively foisted on innocent young children, but children today are being sexualized at younger and younger ages.”

Paisley’s mom doesn’t understand why everybody’s so upset:

The mother of the 3-year-old girl dressed as a prostitute on “Toddlers and Tiaras” tells TMZ, she’s a good mom — and insists “no harm was done to my child” by dressing her as a hooker.
Wendy Dickey tells us, her kid had no idea what she was dressed as anyway — and the costume was “less revealing than gymnastics wear and swimsuits.”
According to Wendy, the hooker outfit . . . “is a lot less harmful.”

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18 comments

  1. Who’s at fault?

    The sh*twit mother?
    The sponsors of Toddler beauty contests?
    The TV corporation broadcasting the shows?
    The pedophiles enjoying the mainstreaming of their very own soft-pR0n?

  2. The girl may not realize she was dressed as a hooker (or even what a hooker is), but with a mother who thinks it’s fun to dress her toddler up that way and to act “sexy”, it doesn’t bode well for the girl’s future…

  4. Greece.  Rome.  England.  All mighty civilizations/empires at one time.  They had one thing in common, before the eventual fall – morals were thrown out the window in favor of a more enlightened, anything goes society. 

  7. Hadn’t considered that.  That’d mean they’re following the old Communist playbook.  Breakdown American society.  Take over the schools and universities.  Split the American family (values).  Control the media.  etc etc etc

  8. There are a couple of aspects of this story which haven’t yet been addressed.

    1) How will Paisley feel about herself and her mom when she — at some future date — Googles herself and finds this video?

    2) Parents are expected to set proper boundaries about what is and is not age appropriate behavior for their children.  Paisley’s mom says it was no big deal for her daughter to be strutting her stuff at three, since Paisley didn’t know what a prostitute is and what she was doing.  Okay, but what happens if Paisley continues in this behavior and later figures out what it’s about?  Will it suddenly stop being okay for her to do this?  Will mom finally put her foot down (too late, of course) and expect Paisley to comport herself in a more appropriate way, or will she just shrug and give up?

    3) When Paisley wants to dress like a hooker later in life — say, at ten — will that be okay with mom, too?  Again, at what point does mom decide that it’s inappropriate?  And how does she explain the difference to Paisley?

    The trouble here is parents can’t tell kids that one day x behavior is fine and the next that it isn’t.  If there’s no consistency in the rules, then it causes friction in the relationship.  Paisley doesn’t have to know what a prostitute is today to think it’s okay to dress like that and swing her hips suggestively as she struts.  All she knows is mom says it’s okay now.  When/if the day comes when it isn’t, Paisley won’t understand why mom suddenly has changed the rules.

    The video didn’t indicate whether there’s a dad, step-dad, or any other adult male around… but one has to wonder how comfortable dad would be watching his daughter behave like that.

  14. I’m kind of partial to the idea that the late David Brudnoy espoused: having to obtain a license to be eligible to give birth [that should make the Libertarian heads explode, although Mr. Brudnoy was a card-carrying member]. 

  15. In a sane culture, this show would have been drowned in righteous indignation before it even began filming.  But this is not a sane culture — it is a depraved one.  And we let it happen.  And we continue to feed the Beast.

  18. I reread Ringworld the other day.  Earth in 2800 had a one child policy, but you could get a license beyond that if you were really smart, rich (the ability to make money was determined to be a good quality), or had some desirable genetic quality.  But they also had a birth lottery that was purly random.   I liked the concept of a birth lottery that over six generations produced a small group of people with incredibly strong genetic luck (because their ancestors won the lottery each generation). 

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