Sheep following a Shepherd in Pimped Ride.

When I was 11 I began calling all those annoying little girls that never traveled in groups of less than four and for some reason looked creepily alike "pod-people". They were foreign to me. A seperate entity. Then, as I watched the girl I babysat coo over Bratz dolls (which I still find disturbing), I asked her what she thought was an attractive outfit. Within seconds I got back, "A shirt that shows your stomach." She was seven at the time, consequently holding a doll whose skirt was wider than it was long and a shirt that probably wouldn't have passed as a bathing suit top. That startled me into the realization that we are not only driven to emulate what we see, but we start incredibly young. Fast forwarding to a few months ago, my young friend told me she was frustrated with the fact that her parents wouldn't buy her different clothes. Her's weren't emo enough for her. It was like she wanted to display bodily what her favorite band, Tokio Hotel, liked to display in an effort to claim kinship with them and their style. I looked at her, at her white jogging suit with pink stripes, perfectly combed hair cut short, and black nailpolish spread messily over her nails (her only defiance) and told her "Just be yourself, people will be more than willing to categorize you in high school. You can love something without having to change everything about your appearance to suit it." I wondered why she would want to place herself into a preset mold when she could make her own. I already knew the answer to that question, but I asked myself anyway, like I never was faced with it. Kids aren't kids anymore. They're very small 25 year olds. It's the natural inquisitiveness and cruelty of a child with all the impertinence and body consciousness of a "teenager". Greenfield caught that strange combination in every photograph. One in particualr, of a young girl named Ashleigh, actually made me laugh a little when I saw it because she looked like a 45 year old woman trying to look like a 20 year old woman who is trying to look like a mature woman of status. She should have tried harder to look like a little girl named Ashleigh. Not that I don't think it's wonderful for kids to grow up in a financially well off home, but sometimes I think it gets out of hand and promotes the idea of getting adult things and dressing like what you're exposed to. I just wanted to feed sweets to that poor young girl on the scale, I truly did. But I digress. My point is that the pressure to emulate what we see in the media and mature quicker than is natural is almost too great to feel. It surrounds us so much, we don't even notice it anymore, myself included. So yes, I do own a pair of slouchy boots. And yes, I'm pretty sure someone somewhere decided they were cool and it rubbed off on me. But the truth is, seeing those young girls like that pains me. Seeing those young men thinking only of wealth because apparently that's the only thing that is important makes me want to weep a bit. It all brings me back to the painfully shy, eager to please young girl who called those other girls "pod-people" in flared jeans.