June 2011

Tell Clothing Company to Stop Sexing Up Little Girls

I never did understand what the lyrics in “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd meant. Did they really want to have sex with the person they are singing to (“We can do it till we both wake up”), or did they mean they wanted to sexually glorify her? While I’m leaning toward the former, I think Submarine Kids might have had the latter in mind when designing their latest repulsive swimsuit ad.

The images of the kids in it—around the age of my five-year-old daughter, perhaps a tiny bit older—are simply grotesque and nothing short of disturbing. They exhibit thick layers of obnoxious makeup and bright, jarring wigs as they provocatively pose, wearing little bikinis in an actual advertisement not in a pornographic magazine for pedophiles, but for actual swimwear for kids.

For those of you who’ve read The Hunger Games series, these images appear to be miniature people from The Capitol, rather than children. In fact, a couple of the images look as if they could be adults—especially in the way they’ve been instructed to pose—rather than children. And as one person in advertising noted, every decision in advertising is on purpose, in mind to accomplish something. Just what is that something here?