Hey, that's not funny

This post, from about a year ago, is a lot more "sex columnist" me than "mommy blogger" me,
 but if people are going to dress tiny babies up as tiny Jayne Mansfields, that's going to happen.
-Andrea

Hey, that's not funny

“Little girls can get a jump start on their strut and be top-models-in-training before they leave the crib”
- Bobbi Thomas
The Today Show

I knew this post reminded me of something but I couldn't place it at first. What could be nearly as offensive as porn-gear for babies but is in fact not a parody but an actual product? Finally, I got it— high heels for infant girls, of course. Have you seen them? Did you know they're called "Heelarious?"

I suppose the effect is vaguely comic in the way sticking a chimpanzee in a business suit and giving him an attache case is traditionally considered comic, but while such images are alleged to lampoon the viewer more than the subject, I've never been convinced. 

Finally, though, this image just doesn't strike me as particularly funny, and "hilarious" is surely pushing it.

I've been writing about sex for over a decade, during which time I've quoted Andrea Dworkin's famous warning, "I'm a radical feminist, not the fun kind" more than once, always in the service of suggesting that I, at least, am the fun kind. I've always felt a little guilty about it, though, and when Dworkin died a couple years back I was at least a little glad to see how much respect she had commanded, not only among founding feminists of her own generation, but among younger, fun-kind feminists like Susie Bright.

As a fun-kind feminist I necessarily have a lot invested in being able to laugh about pretty much anything (um yes, I have laughed at Holocaust jokes) but I'm not sure I'm willing or able to turn off my squeamishness entirely when it comes to even the non-exploitative, all-in-good-fun sexualization of young children. Heels are about sex, not just fashion, even if I don't buy the Susan Brownmiller-era argument that men think heels are sexy because it's harder for you to get away. Heels certainly do mimic lordosis behavior and emphasize female secondary sex characteristics. They are sexy. And it's not just the sexualization that discomfits me but the premature exposure to the entire end of the female fashion and grooming spectrum which requires sacrifice, pain, extreme inconvenience, and the likely development of a bottomless pit of self-dissatisfaction, with the implied expectation that one's girl-child, currently weighing 15 pounds and wearing a duckie onesie, will inevitably seek out and be mired in same. It feels too fast, and too enforced. "You will perform femininity, and you will like it, missy." "

Oh lighten up, you say? It's just a harmless joke!

Put them on your boy baby and we'll talk.

Which reminds me: the inventors are apparently coming out with something called HElarious for little Jaxon and Caden but it's a secret. What will it be? Chest-hair onesie? Diaper cover with built-in bulge? Foam beer-sleeve for baby bottle? What is the hyper-masculinity equivalent of pink satin high-heeled shoes, and is it funny?

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