How old should a young lady be before she’s able to be the cover model for a fashion show?
Take a look at the young lady at the right and meet Maddison Gabriel. She was picked as the official ambassador of Gold Coast Fashion Week in Australia. She’s modeled a number of revealing outfits for the Queensland event.
Now, we’ve all talked before about how our society glorifies girls as sex-symbols rather than people, how it objectifies them. But, to some degree, people have to be free to choose to do right or wrong. But at what age?
What if I told you that the model on the right is 12 years old?
Fashion Week spokesman Kelly Wieler said Maddison was not too young.
“Maddy got in because she was the best contestant – the judges saw that she was fit to do the job.”
She added that the schoolgirl would not be modelling swimwear or lingerie.
Well, not this year, anyway…
Yikes!
Posted by Colleen | September 20, 2007, 9:11 amThe caption of the picture says: “Maddison Gabriel insists she can ‘fit into women’s clothes’”
All I could think was that, since in the high fashion industry world, women’s clothes are designed for prepubescent bodies anyway, this is hardly surprising. I guess it’s easier to find a twelve-year-old to wear them than to keep finding stick-shaped adult women.
Posted by Jake | September 20, 2007, 10:32 amThis is not surprising, but it is very sad. I feel sorry for this girl who is being lured into selling her body and looks.
Posted by Revka | September 20, 2007, 11:00 amI thought this was very sad – but again, not surprising.
Our society is sexualizing children – lower and lower ages all of the time. This is just another instance.
Poor girl.
Posted by Holly | September 20, 2007, 5:19 pmIt’s just another step toward promoting pedophilia. Disgusting.
Posted by Jenna | September 20, 2007, 10:53 pmWhat do you guys do to prevent promoting this type of stuff?
Posted by Heather | September 21, 2007, 11:22 amWell, I think you inadvertently (or maybe purposefully?) hit a good point. Because we talk about it means they get more publicity and even bad publicity is good publicity. But we certainly can’t ignore it. I guess the most we can hope for by talking about it is that other parents will not let their daughters be models at this age.
Anyone have any ideas?
Posted by MInTheGap | September 21, 2007, 3:22 pmJenna I’m concerned about your belief that this girl promotes pedophillia. A pedophile is attracted to a prepubecent body, something that she apparently doesn’t have. Normal people will look at this girl realize she’s jailbait and look for someone there own age to be attracted to, and pedophiles will take one look at her and feel no attraction because she doesn’t look like a child. Please remeber when you talk about pedophiles what exactly they are.
Posted by Loc | September 22, 2007, 10:22 pm