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Twelve-year-old Maddison Gabriel (she’s 13 now) is the face of the Gold Coast Fashion Festival in Australia. She’s on the catwalk at the age my mother first let me wear make-up.
I’m disturbed.
I mean, let’s talk about 13. Thirteen is the beginning of high school or the end of junior high (if they even still call it “junior high” these days). Thirteen is braces, study hall, wishing you could drive, navigating catty girls and still-too-short boys, slumber parties and lip gloss. Thirteen is the tip of the adult iceberg, when your body starts to go there but your brain and emotions have not caught up yet.
Thirteen is dangerous for anyone, let alone girls who look like Maddison. Thirteen is when you need your parents the most, when you’re not sure if you have to leave childhood behind just yet, when you want to be older, but it’s kind of scary. Thirteen is when many girls start to look like women, when their bodies blossom without the cellulite and stretch marks of an adult woman. Thirteen is American Beauty.
Thirteen is when you start thinking you have to do things you’re not sure if you want to do in order to move up in the world. I know – I was in dangerous waters at 13. Thirteen reeks of cheap cologne and sweaty boys, varsity football games and chewing gum. Thirteen is when you believe that everyone is doing it. Thirteen is already oversexed. Who needs a runway flanked by adults to help it along? Thirteen thinks adults know what's best. Thirteen needs adults to be the adults in the room.
From across the ocean, people in Australia and abroad are upset about Maddison. It even makes Janice Dickerson, self-claimed world’s first supermodel and reality-television weirdo mad.
And Dickinson said that she will not allow any girls under 18 to model for her agency.
“I have about 32 girls who are dying to break that 18-year-old mark,” she told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer. “Get your high school diploma and then come and see me.”
In Maddison’s Australia, Sheridan Voysey writes:
What’s interesting about this whole scenario is that even more liberally-minded countries like France and Italy have enforced a minimum age of 16 for models hitting the catwalk. The British Fashion Council has announcing (sic) models aged 15 years or younger should not be allowed to enter the London Fashion Week—one of the world's most famous fashion events. And another British inquiry this week recommended that models provide "health certificates" from doctors to prove they don't have an eating disorder. At the very least these moves abroad show the danger inherent in the modeling industry to young women.
Why is everyone so upset? Are we upset for the girls, or are we upset that we find them so alluring? Are we secretly disgusted with ourselves for idolizing nubile youth in the way we do, trotting them about in a way that is unmistakably sexualized? What is the difference between this and child pornography? About three yards of cloth.
Raven writes:
The age of innocence is getting younger and younger. More and more, we hear stories about 3, 4 and 5 yr old girls being the objects of some men’s unholy affections; it’s not shocking anymore to see grown men drool over these 13 yr old “models” either.
Perhaps we have always been fascinated by young girls. The best know it is wrong to exploit them.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Delores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
