This website......

[jon124]

Doesn't know kids, doesn't know how to deal with kids and is setting a bad example. I'm 16 and can already notice that this is quite obviously discrimination in it's mildest form. Oh a website purely for women trying to change a child's life by complaining. How about you look after your kids instead of expecting the government to do it for you.

No doubt this will get deleted in a minute or 2 but you know

totally agree chicken..
as i said ebfore, we don;t raise our children in a vacuum

direct action and protests and media campagins do stop at some level , some inappopriate things happening, educate people and make people stop and think

if there is no correct response in your opinon, how cna you say this response is the wrong one?

Glad I took your mind off whatever it is (Y)

Jon, that's not exactly what I meant - noone has to prove themselves online, that's the beauty of it. It's just a weird site for a teenage boy to come to if he doesn't agree with it. But I like your spirit!

Chickens made a good point about your views on the media bombardment of our children (by which I mean the royal 'our' - I'm still cooking).

Presumably you came here because of what you'd heard in the media, and your perceptions have changed through your experience. But the 'bikini' thing is still black & white for you, because you understandably don't yet have a frame of reference for it.

And what did you expect from us?

Nah, I'm just a very information hunting person. For example I was meant to be revising for one of my hardest exams in a week but I am instead contemplating whether i should ever have kids or not xD

The bikini thing is black and white though :/ Wearing the bikini is wrong is so many ways, parent should prevent this. However, the shop shouldn't be blamed but the people who make the product profitable so appealing for the shop to sell.

Sorry, by 'bikini' I meant the wider issue of prematurely sexualising children.

Yes the bikini part is black & white, but the wider issue, as you've pointed out isn't quite that simple. If the parent should say no, then why not the shop? Why are they exempt from morals? And do the shop owners have children?

Who is ultimately responsible? The parents who do buy things like that for their daughters? The shops who sell it? The delivery drivers who take the stuff to the shops? The factories who make it? The designers who come up with it? The slogan makers? The government? The ad agencies who make the messages attractive to kids? The media bods for promoting the skinny slebs?

Ooh, Lunatic, you have great examples! Elections and ALF... shades of grey there.

Asda are doing a bit of an AIBU aren't they tonight? They signed up for Let Girls Be Girls, then sold a disputable slogan on tshirt. Some people hate it, some don't mind so much.

Well if you were really 16 for a start you'd know that you couldn't just walk into a shop and buy cigarettes, because you have to be 18 to do that. Most people older than about 20 keep forgetting this because the change in the law had no effect on them by the time it came in.

Curiouser and curiouser.
I love 'I am 16, I can tell you my school'.
Hey, I'm a brain surgeon, I can tell you my university and everything.

"By dizzydixies Wed 14-Apr-10 20:54:50
god, I miss being 16 "

I dont. At 16 you think your indestructible and know everything.

My fav time was when i was 26 and went back to Uni as a mature student, i had a fabulous time in Manchester, and it was the days when you got a GRANT to go :O :O

It was the late 70's/earlier 80's. Manchester Hacienda was THE place for live music, i was doing the new exploding skill of Computer Science, it was a fab 3 years.

I wouldnt be a teenager today, or a child. Must really sux to be under 25 these days.

I'm sorry, why will no one believe I'm 16 aha. I don't need to chase girls as I've been in a relationship for over 2 years. Posting one thread on this website doesn't mean I'm not normal. In fact opposite. I want to know more therefore I ask more.

God, i'm only 29 and i wouldn't want to be a teenager again!
When it comes to the marketing of bikinis etc, it's more that there doesn't seem to be any alternative to trakkie bottoms with 'SEXY' on the arse. For 2 year olds. How can this possibly be acceptable?

Really don't care how old you are, we're more worried about our girls being made 'sexy' before they're even in double figures.

I would like to commend jon for being articulate and able to hold a debate. You write very well too.

my feelings wrt Primark and other large companies is this - that rather than the simply equation of supply and demand the larger companies can shape demand and popular culture.

therefore it is right, that when we as a society think that something is morally wrong, we speak out and say so.

Therefore when that company sees that they cannot (in this instance) shape buying culture, they hold their hands up to a fair cop.

this is not the case with other large exploitative companies such as nestle, despite the public protestations as their products remain profitable.

Thank you very much

I see where your coming from and agree a company that large can change say the fashion trend.

How often do you think this can happen though? I'm sure companies as big as primark have hundreds of complaints about their products every day. There's got to be a point where a company has to say sorry we will supply the goods and do our best to please the population but we can't please everyone. Or would you disagree and say there obliged to please everyone?

of course they are going to go where the profit margin lies. I don't thin they should please everyone, in fact they will usually be targeting a very well researched demographic.

I think that a group of people lobbying for clothes for extrmely tall people - on the basis that primark are excluding a proportion of the population, would be met with " very sorry but its not profitable to cater to such a small demographic"

which is quite different from society saying to primark 'hold on padded bikinis for kids is wrong'

sometimes they are wrong and we tell them.

sometimes we would like them to change things ( like trews for tall people example) and they won't becuase it wouldn't be profitable.

Chickens, PMSL at asking a 16 year old boy if he's ever noticed that there's lots of pictures of girls in their pants around.

Ahem.