Stop pimping your daughters

As a child in the 1970s, I don’t remember much stereotyping. I had unisex brown-and-orange Clothkits clothes, made by my mother, or my brothers’ rugby shorts. I wore my yellow M&S nightie as my only long dress to parties and had a turquoise Chopper. My sister and I were the goalposts for my brothers’ football matches but only until we could kick a ball. We used their Action Men, they cut the hair off our Barbies. We read the same books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Swallows and Amazons and the Famous Five series (every book had to have two boys and two girls).

I haven’t taken my boys to ballet lessons, but Lily joined them at karate and rock climbing and playing with Lego. Then she went to an all-girls’ primary school. On their first World Book Day she was the only one in her class who wasn’t Harriet the Hamster Fairy or Goldie the Sunshine Fairy, she was the black witch in Room on the Broom. The next year she was Pippi Longstocking and everyone else was Sleeping Beauty but it didn’t deter her. Her friend broke her ankle running in high-heeled clicky-clack Snow White shoes, she preferred purple Converse.

This is not some bizarre Canadian experiment where we have tried to create a gender-neutral child. We called her Lily, she has long blonde hair, is obsessed by ponies and at the age of 8 can wield a hairdryer as well as a Nerf gun but she doesn’t have a designer wardrobe of Chloé and Chanel mini dresses or wear eyeshadow.

So when the features desk asked me to take her to a beauty parlour for children in Brentwood, Essex, I was horrified. We watched an episode of The Only Way is Essex: fake boobs, spray tan, hair extensions, false lashes. She was going to turn into a Towie.

When we arrived at the salon it was shut. “Sorry, darling, we’ve had a leak,” the owner tells Lily. “I can’t disappoint you, pop in and I’ll do your nails.” Lily is soon sitting at a Barbie-pink station, having her nails buffed. “What colour sweetheart?” Lily explains she is a tomboy so isn’t sure she wants a colour. “I’m a tomboy too but it’s nice to have a bit of a pamper,” Michelle says.

Why did she decide to set up a beauty salon? “Because I want to make enough money to buy a cottage in the country and get a pony and chickens for my two little girls,” she says. She had a cupcake maker, a chocolate fountain and a glitter spray for children’s parties but it wasn’t kitsch or kinky. “It’s not about girls saying, ‘Oh Michelle, I chipped a nail’,” she says. “It’s about having a get-together with your girlfriends.”

“Mummy, Michelle is lovely and brave and hardworking and you can’t be nasty about her,” Lily says as we walk out, Michelle having refused to take any money. Lily has discovered the sisterhood rather than some sinister cult. “Be careful of your nails,” I shout as she races down the road.

But what about pole-dancing for children? Lily was interested. “Is it like dancing round a totem pole?” I talked to Sarah Burge, who does “polecise” classes for kids of 8 in Northampton. “Ballet is boring and this is an extension of gymnastics. It originated in China. It’s only recently that it has been seen as sleazy. Boys play with guns, that doesn’t mean they will grow up to be killers. Girls playing with poles doesn’t mean they will be strippers,” she says. So far so good. “And it’s good for girls to show off their curves as they get older. Girls need to feel relaxed about their bodies. I might dance sexually round a pole for a man and do a striptease but that’s for teenagers, not little girls.”

She has lost me. A former Hugh Hefner bunny girl, she doesn’t back down. “Women want to be objects of desire. My ex-partner beat me up and I was disfigured for years before I had plastic surgery and I can tell you it’s all about looks for women. I wouldn’t pay for my daughter to go to university but I have booked her a boob job when she turns 21.” Definitely a step too far.

But it’s not just Northampton and Essex — girls everywhere believe that looks rather than personality are what matters. SlutWalk, the first feminist march for decades, is all about clothes rather than career prospects and not even about banning the burka but about the right to wear shorts, bras and bunny ears. The model Lily Cole has just got a double first in Classics at the University of Cambridge but it’s her looks that have made her cool.

That day we attended a children’s opera of Fantastic Mr Fox in Holland Park, West London. Rows of children sat in their Boden hotchpotch while the mothers talked Brazilians. Their 12-year-old daughters think they need to fit one in between their exam revision to look fit for the beach. These girls are doing it for the boys and their mothers are forking out £100 a month so their daughters can look prepubescent again. “It’s like piercing your ears, you may as well make sure it’s done properly,” a mother says. Only it’s not. You didn’t pierce your ears for the boys in your class but for the girls, and should boys of 12 be scrutinising their female peers so closely?

Dr Helen Wright, head of the Girls’ Schools Association of independent schools, is horrified by the pressure girls are under “to be raunchy, dumb and obsessed with looks”. More! magazine, which teenage girls read, she points out, has a feature this month using Barbie and Ken dolls in sexual positions and has a spread on 30 sexy holiday outfits. “We need to stand up to the sexualised images of women and the Botoxed celebrity,” she says. “We need to go back to championing individuality and intellectual depth.”

We are the ones setting the example. Last year at a Kensington school the top tombola prize was £5,000 of cosmetic surgery for the mothers so they could look like little girls for their husbands again. Our mothers aged gracefully, doing a few Canadian Air Force exercises; we struggle, debating Botox or bangs. Tanya Byron, The Times’s clinical psychologist, points out: “What has happened to the efforts of the women of my mother’s generation who fought hard for their daughters to be respected as individuals with a brain?”

We can stand up to it. In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein explains how pink for girls is a modern marketing tool. All babies used to wear white before washing machines so their clothes could be boiled. When nursery colours were introduced “Pink was the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, symbolised femininity.”

So throw away your Pinkalicious book and buy your daughter The Night Pirates about little girl pirates. The Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson, who writes books about whales and snails, says, “We have to stop thinking girls only want to read about princesses and boys about football.” Stella McCartney has designed clothes for Gap, including mustard yellow for girls and violet for boys.

You can say no when your daughter asks for a padded bra at 8. But it’s harder to shield children from sex on the internet. Our ten-year-old son came back from a playdate and said: “Do you know what happens when you put girl-on-girl sex into Google?” It’s why Google employees tell you to keep your computer in the kitchen.

It’s hard to stop them listening to music too. Lily loves Nicole Scherzinger, of Pussycat Dolls, with her lyrics, “I like it dirty”. Kylie’s 1980s “I should be so lucky” is nothing compared with Rihanna’s “Sex is in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it”.

Mike Stock, of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, admits the music industry has created an army of ten-year-old girls who want to move and dress like hookers. “What is happening now doesn’t just undo the good work done by the feminists of the 1970s,” he says, “it drags us almost back to the Stone Age. Women as seen through the eyes of the music industry have become little more than sex objects.” He should know, he launched the career of Mandy Smith at 16 with her debut I Just Can’t Wait.

But it’s more in your face now. You find yourself explaining to an eight-year-old why Lily Allen is lying in a wet patch in the middle of her bed. Pop music used to be banal rather than venal, female singers were sweet (Kylie) or self-confident (Madonna) rather than submissive (Rihanna). “Now there’s a real danger that its cynical and relentless addiction to sex could damage boys and girls in a way that may last their entire lifetime,” Stock says.

That’s what’s wrong: a bit of nail polish, a splash of pink, a three-year-old in a bikini is fine if they are doing it for fun or doing it with their girlfriends. But teaching girls that life is about looking good for men is wrong. We know it is, so we need to stop pimping our daughters.