Is the Mini-Whoooooooore Dead? Man, I Hope So

When I was a teenager, my mother used to describe the mode of dress of some of my female friends and acquaintances as such: "She dresses like a mini-whore." Being an average teenage boy at the time, I probably responded, "Oh yeaahhh," at least that was the censored version, and of course, non-verbal in front of Mom. But the more I thought about the term "mini-whore", the funnier it became, with images of a horde (or whored?) of floosie midgets or little plastic, wind-up hookers - "It's Chatty Chatterly! She says 37 different phrases that usually only accidentally end up on a handful of ordinary talking dolls. New from Hasbro!" Now that I am a dad, I understand what my mother was saying, at least I did a few years ago when I dreaded what I was certain would be the new line of floss fashion from Oral-B that my daughter would want to wear because "everyone else is wearing it." Recent shopping trips, however, have showed that I could be dead wrong.

What the heck is attractive about butt crack? I spent the better part of my college years missing too many classes because I was planning the perfect way to Spackle-over the frequently appearing butt crack of a roommate, appearances caused by a combination of genetics and multiple visits to Acapulco, the Mexican joint across from the now-former Fort McClellan, Alabama. Unfortunately, four years of strategizing with other friends also offended by the crack yielded no coverage. Little did we know that my roomy was not an offender of the senses, but actually ahead of his fashion time.

Had he come along just a few years later, my roommate would have been just another hole in Butt Crack Nation. A decade or so ago, a decree was issued by some fashionista who desperately could have used my elementary school speech teacher and who walked, with apologies to the late Lewis Grizzard, as if he were trying to carry a corncob without using his hands; showing your butt - literally - was IN. If you weren't wearing jeans or a skirt low enough to see the Maginot Line, you might as well be wearing a burqa. The size of your rump didn't matter, and neither did your gender. About 27 seconds after the issuance of the crack decree, the only place you could buy women's jeans that actually fit properly, at least by prior standards, was next to the magnetized bracelets that cure hemorrhoids in the coupon section of the newspaper.

The new butt crack style was immediately taken up by clothing stores in malls such as Slut and it's companion store for tweens and younger, Lil' Slut. Well, that wasn't the exact name of the store, but it might as well have been. There was, perhaps, just enough fabric on the racks in the typical Lil' Slut store to make an average man's sport coat. What I, to this day, still wonder is why parents thought this was okay, why allowing your 9-year-old daughter to hang out with their friends while wearing nothing but a couple of strategically placed straps was supposed to be normal. One can see why a parent who actually believed in the clothed-lifestyle would be worried, which is the main reason I was shocked a couple days ago during a family outing at Savannah's Oglethorpe Mall and a subsequent trip to the Rincon, GA version of the blue-tinted big box store we will refer to as Mal-Wart.

At the mall's equivalent of the Lil' Slut store, we saw mannequins in the windows....wearing clothes! Real clothes; shirts, skirts WITH LEGGINGS ON UNDERNEATH! Pants that rose above the equator. My stunned wife checked to see if I had a goatee to make sure she hadn't gone through a temporal shift into a parallel world, but The Doctor never showed up, and I can't grow facial hair, so we knew it was true. What had happened? When did King/Queen Fashionista end their 347th consecutive day of watching Jerry Lewis DVD's, sashay to Bryant Park and declare that fabric covering your parts was okay?

A few days later, during a visit with the kids to Mal-Wart's toy section, we were in an aisle that used to hold the ultimate slutty doll, the Bratz - the "We're showing your kids it's cool to be mostly nekkid AND have enough collagen to where your lips touch your cleavage" doll. The maker of Bratz has been embroiled in a court battle with Mattel, the maker of Barbie, as Mattel argues that Barbie was mostly nekkid before mostly nekkid was cool. However, on the rack in the absence of Bratz were another brand of dolls who were clothed modestly and who were not made up like they were going to work at the Chicken Ranch. Not only that, but some Mal-Wart shoppers who hadn't gotten the memo that clothing was in again - and who DESPERATELY needed the memo in bold print - were accompanied by tween and teenage kids who were wearing twice as much fabric as mom/stepmom/Great Aunt Margie Nell. If this is Bizarro-World, I don't want to go home.

My wife thinks that parents our age are in rebellion against the previous parental generation. They apparently believed that dressing as a ho was okay, since they apparently missed out on being Poison and Whitesnake groupies during their youth, and if the ho-biscuit clothing line was good enough for them, it should be good enough for their kids. Maybe it has something to do with the increasing use of school uniforms and kids discovering that clothes that cover one's butt are not a sign of Armageddon. Frankly, I don't care as long as the trend continues for the next 70 or 80 years. If Mr. Fashionista decides to reverse the clothing trend again, he and I will have a serious talk over a bottle of chardonnay and the biggest corncob I can get my hands on, just in case I need to use it.