by Fallon Lucombe
Originally posted at F to the Third Power

Fallon Lucombe is a senior at Elisabeth Irwin High School. Fallon plays volleyball and is also a peer leader for ninth graders at her school. Fallon is interested in launching the SPARK movement because she would like to be a part of raising awareness about the issue of sexualization of women and girls in the media.

“When I have my girl, she’ll be Dora the Explorer till she’s 16, in a loose shirt and shorts down to her knees. These costumes for little girls are just too sexy.”

This is what my sister said to me after I asked if she had found a costume for my nephew at Party City this weekend. She had called me from the store and I could barely hear her over all the background noise, I was only able to make out “it looks like a Jay-Z concert in here, I cant find anything,” before she got tired of yelling into her phone and hung up. Being a new mother, she noticed the difference between the girls and boys costumes: the boys costumes where cute, mostly super heroes, mostly covered up, but the girls costumes was another story altogether. The costumes were all things that she would wear. So why are we dressing our female toddlers in the same costume as their mothers? Why do we think it’s ok to expose our little girls and teach them it’s ok to be sexualized  before they even know their address by heart?

It’s not ok and we shouldn’t think that it is. These little girls are growing up internalizing these messages we are sending them, and what we are teaching them is that it’s not about what’s on the inside, it’s about what’s on the outside . . . of your clothes. We are teaching our little girls to be sexy before they even know the meaning of the word and this path can only lead to the destruction of women and all that we truly are.