Modesty in young girls’ fashion?

Leggings aren't impractical. Sportsmen wear what are essentially leggings all the time. And there is a growing movement of men wearing leggings "every day"

And men go topless or wear trousers so tight you can see their balls...

So your photo was taken in Knightsbridge. I don't know what it's reputation is now but at the time it was the epitome of trendy fashion. And this might have been what was acceptable in London but certainly was not what the young women were wearing in the NE of England. In the same way the fashion for topless dresses never made it to most places outside London or other cosmopolitan places. If anyone had tried wearing hotpants as revealing as those in your photo or topless dresses in most places then there would have been absolute moral outrage.

How we think about gendered clothing starts when children are barely out of the womb.
Unfortunately we still code girls into pink, tight, impractical clothing like tights and leggings from the get go and boys into blue ‘rough and tumble’ looser, more freeing shorts and t shirts.
It becomes so much a part of our consciousness that we then start to justify why women should be “ free to wear whatever they want” - but we only say that when we are justifying tight, revealing, sexually provocative clothing. We just don’t have the same debate about men’s clothing -which, if society was as equal as we often claim it to be- we should also be having because there would be swathes of men out there wearing hot pant shorts and slashed to the waist vests. But there aren’t. Because; Patriarchy.
Should women be able to wear whatever they want? Yes of course. However, we very rarely expand the conversation to ask why they want to, when the same choices/ opprobrium is not extended to men.

I was fully prepared to agree with you op but I can't see anything wrong with the shorts you posted. Rhey are just cycling shorts aren't they? It just shows how subjective this whole topic is.

So to be considered skimpy they gave to be exactly the same??? That’s ridiculous as those fabrics were not invented.

but shorts so short that the arse cheeks were no even covered properly let alone with tight Lycra and shirts so short you saw knickers were worn.

But for some reason these don’t count to you. Tight Lycra shorts that cover more skin are less appropriate to you

The pics I posted are younger teens or tweens.

Really?? No bum cheeks? Really??

The OPs shorts were not bum scrunch, they were as she put it, like cut off leggings and whilst of course the clothes are not exactly the same, they are a clear indication that shorts even shorter than the cycle shorts the OP showed and crop tops (yes yes not exact) have been worn since the 1970s. So NOTHING new. One girl in the 80s in my pictures is wearing an actual bra top so I can’t see how you can look at these pictures and determine that girls are wearing way worse now and morality has plummeted.

my pictures clearly show that young teens and preteens wore very very short shorts and various types of crop tops from crop t-shirts to bikini style tops 50 years ago.

I agree the shorts in the pic are in fact modest.

Scrunch bum leggings or those shorts which basically expose most of the buttocks are much more tacky and seem to be designed to draw attention to erogenous zones, which the shorts in the photo don’t.

Young girls and young children are the same wavelength

Girls can = children which is why so many on MN are mortally offended by being called girls when they are 50

the woman in the skin tight body suit was not a child or a teenager. She was in her mid twenties. I see loads of teens in basque or bra-let style tops though.

”young children” is not the same phrase as “young girls” 😆 May I introduce you to the idea that different phrases mean different things?

Well yes I plead guilty to wearing hot pants when I was 19 in the 1970s.
I can quite categorically state that firstly no bum cheeks were displayed in those days. Or certainly not in the NE of England. Also that the age of the girls and young women wearing hot pants was not as young as the children who wear them now. And that there was not the prevelance and normalisation of pornography in general and the teen,and child, focused pornography that is widespread now.

In the 1970s the modern feminist movement was in it's infancy. We are 50 years down the line and I would have hoped the strides that women have made in being recognised as equal to men would have come on in leaps and bounds. And that this equality would mean that women no longer would feel the need to parade around virtually naked while men remain clothed. But sadly this is not the case.

A thirteen or fourteen year old girl is a child.

Agreed. Now, when someone speaks of "young children", do you imagine teenagers?

Ah there we go

I thought this thread had gone on for surprisingly long without someone accusing other posters of being men 😒😒

Young girls makes them sound under 10. Teenagers aren't young girls. They are girls, teens, at the older end they are young women. But young girls are primary school

Well, there is a big difference between a thirteen year old and a nineteen year old. I doubt when the OP is talking about girls that she means nineteen year old women. (One might even call a nineteen year old a girl, quite routinely.) Whereas it really isn’t remotely demeaning (and that’s also the opinion of my rather strong willed DD!) to call a thirteen year old a young girl.

IMO if there’s anything that really does sound like internalised misogyny on this thread, it’s the insistence that young teenagers shouldn’t be considered children or young girls. It’s always been rather convenient for men to pretend that thirteen or fourteen or fifteen year olds are not actually young girls. It’s pretty weird to find women arguing the same. A thirteen or fourteen year old girl is a child. No matter how mature they might feel, legally and socially we recognise that they really aren’t adults, and not even sort-of-adults, either. They’re children.

"Young" girls are not teenagers

No one actually call them "teenagers" when talking about them - it's "the girls" the "young girls"

Young girls are children

Teenagers are not young girls

Calling them young girls is massively demeaning

No

A young girl is not a teenager

Calling teenagers "young girls" is infantalising

A 14 year old is a teenager
A young girl makes them sound under 10

I can almost guarantee that some of the "adults" are 16

Yes, micro- dresses from the 60s were so modest 😂

@bumbaloo posted pics of teenagers from the same era.

They are grown women though in those pics. It 12/13 year olds.