...to ask if I am I being a prude about these outfits?

[bellav]

My 11yo DD has taken a liking to K-Pop recently, but I am concerned about some of the outfits and dancing styles, especially as some of the singers are very young.

It feels to me like they are being exploited and sexualised at such a young age, but I am unsure how to go about discussing this with my daughter.

Am I just being a prude and showing my age here?!

Link to some of the worst offenders:

https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/15-extremely-revealing-stage-outfits-banned/

You're allowed to think that it's not ok, @bellav whatever you grew up with.

And no, you're not a 'prude' because you think differently to others

I remember having this conversation with my mum when I was about that age and wanting a cropped junkies baddy powder t shirt just like mark owens ! And don’t get me started on the fetching spliffy jacket 😂 it was 100% inappropriate 😂 but that’s being a teenager isn’t it ? Oh and I think my mum had the same convo with her mum about wondering around bare foot thinking she was a hippie in the 70’s I mean that wasn’t a great idea when you think of how people never picked up dog poo 🤢. She will grow out of it

I doubt the male gaze is involved at all. The girls are being sold an image and a lifestyle.

The more you blow this up as a 'thing' the more you add glamour to it.

My tip is to ensure your daughter has access to as broad a range of cultural experiences as possible - all kinds of music, dance, fashion, art, history and also social history. She needs to see Kpop in context and against a background of other female artists and feminism and then she will be well informed and able to make her own long term decisions.

Let her watch Kpop videos but also take her to the East End Women's Museum and the Pankhurst Centre Museum. If you open her mind you open the whole world to her.

My Dniece is 10 and this music is very, very much aimed at that age group. She went to a concert at 02 recently and it was rammed with prepubescent girls screaming.

So, yes, it is pretty distasteful in that context. She and her friends will obviously want to copy the look and the dancing and honestly, if anyone thinks a 10 year old dancing like these videos is fine then I’d say they are the ones with a problem.

It being nothing new doesn’t mean it’s fine! I think many people now look back on Brittney and think it was highly inappropriate. OP, some people are fine with this stuff and others aren’t. It’s ok for you to decide what your values are and explain them to your children. I wouldn’t let a 12 year old be heavily exposed to this stuff.

Interesting that people are talking about the overt sexualization of very young women in the past, as if that somehow makes it OK that we’re still doing it!

From memory there have been many issues about K-pop, J-pop etc. over the years.
From the age of the "starts", how they are treated, the sexualised nature of the music and clothing and how the "stars" are treated and then discarded.
There have been multiple deaths and mental health issues in the news.

Have you forgotten how Brittany spears broke onto the scene? I remember as a late teen being pretty shocked by the schoolgirl outfit and posing with a tiny tricycle. Its just what pop stars do to be noticed, it's not new thing

I grew up in the 60s/70s. The youngest female pop star I knew of was Mary Hopkin who was 18 when she had a hit with Those Were The Days. Such innocent days.

If she likes K-Pop maybe point her in the direction of some of the boy groups instead.

And just because Britney did it doesn’t make it any better!

K-Pop girl groups are this weird mixture of innocence, youth and sexuality. Boobs must be covered up but legs are fine. In Korea men are into girl groups, girls are into boy groups.

@Winter2020 I would say that Kpop Demon Hunters portrays the girls as older and less creepily sexualised.

There is far more wrong with Kpop than the outfits and dance moves.

Dance outfits are often fairly skimpy - across all styles, so that the body shapes can be seen.

I think 'sexy moves' can be seen at any dance show and sometimes in very young children - not sure when this started, I think maybe 80s 90s?

Kpop goes back to the sort of 'ownership' that was seen in the 1950s in the film industry - treating individuals in the way Judy Garland was treated and worse.

I think open conversation with your daughter is the way to go - exploring what she thinks, does she like what they wear, would she wear it or would she feel uncomfortable in it?

Me too. I don’t like the over sexualisation of female pop stars (I blame Madonna for starting it 🫣). My favourite singers have never cavorted suggestively in front of the cameras and it’s a real bug bear of mine. Ironically though most of the audience for half naked, writhing female singers are fellow girls/women, the guys are off watching Metallica or Post Malone etc.

After your time? I'm 51 and am scarily familiar with the Britney/Christina oeuvre. The latters 'Dirty' is sort of vile but brilliant at the same time and such a tune. I think you may have been unusually disconnected from popular culture in your 20s and 30s because there's nothing dramatically new here.

"Everyone"? Really?

To me it’s pretty obvious that the fewer clothes the singer is wearing then the more shite and auto-tuned the music is.
Dusty & Aretha never had to get their tits out! 😉

Fashions have always pushed boundaries (I wore skirts up to my belly button - almost) but sexualised dancing like that? A hard 'no' from me.

Yes! It’s the “ I’ve been bludgeoned into numbness, don’t worry.. you’ll go numb soon too.”

This is exactly what I was thinking. I don’t understand why something is ok just because it has precedence. I also don’t think someone is a prude just because they are concerned about how this kind of sexualised presentation of young women affects their overwhelmingly pre teen fans.

I don't really understand the studiedly worldly 'oh, none of this is new' comments.
a) the OP's daughter is into this music and look now, so it's new to them.
b) the fact that it isn't new is a bit worrying, no? So women/girls have been using sexualised looks/clothes/dancing to sell product, often under direction or pressure often from men, for a long time. Is that a good reason to shrug and just not question it? Or is that precisely why we SHOULD question it?

I agree with PP that this is nothing new. What depresses the hell out of me is that it’s not getting any better. I hoped my daughters would be able to grow up in a world that had learned something. I was wrong.

When Elvis did his first tv show he wasn't allowed to move his hips as it was too suggestive. Sex and music have always esys been intertwined

Did you never watch Top of the Pops with Pans people/Legs &Co?

I seen a documentary once about the sexualisation of your girls in Korea, there was whole shops dedicated to child looking porn, babyfiying girls etc. You can get sexual photoshoots there with the aim to look as young a possible with all sorts of outfits etc, parents were taking their young teens to have these photos shoots done.
it said they have big issues with child abuse because of this.

Now that's its becoming popular in our countries its very different to what we are used to but probably pretty tame by their point of view.

I watched the videos and apart from maybe one, I thought it was quite tame. That’s how they all dance and have done for decades. Have you watched any girl dance troops recently. Kids as young as 4- 5 come out with worse than that. I grew up with Madonna etc. She was fab but it didn’t mean I started hanging around in town in my bra and pants. Give your child credit to understand it’s a performance.