The other day, Christine and I went to get her a pair of shoes for a wedding we are attending this weekend. As we left the store and walked towards the car – a very underdressed lady was coming out of the card store we just passed. She was wearing a cutoff top and shorts that were so tight – they could have been painted on. While I have no problem with the way people choose to dress, I did have a problem with the way this lady chose to dress – because she was no more then fourteen.

It seems that as the years pass – articles of clothing become more and more revealing – and the girls that choose to wear them get younger and younger. Personally, I think that a girl who dresses this way and is younger then seventeen should not be allowed out of the house by her parents – but I am apparently one of the very few people that feel this way.

If these young girls are getting their tiny hands on clothes like this – that means that manufacturers are making very scantily clad clothing for girls of this age. Worse then that, the stores that sell these clothes are going right along with this new trend and marketing these clothes to a younger and younger audience – some stores more then others.

Last week, J.C. Penney was forced to pull a television commercial that showed a young girl getting dressed for school and having her mother proclaim that she was not going to school, “dressed like that” – but instead of thinking her daughter’s clothes were too provocative – the mother in the commercial thought the clothes were not provocative enough – and proceeded to help her daughter dress in a more revealing outfit.

I am not trying to sound “un cool” – I just think that girls that are not even old enough to work or drive yet, but show more skin then they cover are sending the wrong message. The early teenage years are the years when boys and girls begin to get an understanding of sex. So girls who are dressing in little shirts and shorts might give their young male friends an impression that they are not trying to convey – but are inadvertently doing just that by the clothes they wear.

Worse then that, these girls could be putting themselves in horrible danger and not even knowing it. In an already oversexed society where pornography is an eight billion dollar a year industry and not a day goes by in this country where a woman is not raped – all it takes is one sicko to see a young, defenseless, and very underdressed little girl for the unthinkable to happen.

If the clothing manufacturers want to put out this type of clothing and the stores want to market it – there is nothing that anyone can do. But I think it’s up to the parents of these young girls to have a talk with their young daughters – and tell them the dangers of dressing as revealing as the girl I saw the other day – before they find out the hard way.