The teenage ones were bad enough. Twelve-year-olds wearing more makeup than hookers, trying to look world-weary and jaded, lounging against trees showing off their midriffs and in the process demonstrating how fashion nowadays is actually designed for the bodies of... twelve-year-old-girls. The clothes looked great. The twelve-year-olds looked available. Lovely. In a few years they'll be advertising clothes to adults in all their sixteen-year-old glory, making grown women uncomfortable about their own bodies and racking up some nice little heroin or anorexic habits to keep themselves thin.

Meanwhile, the latest ad photos plastering the walls are of eight-year-olds trying to look... I dunno, as sophisticated as those twelve-year-olds. Yes, it's the latest round of Guess! ads. The cynicism astounds me. I expect it shouldn't, by now; but then, if I didn't still get outraged by this kind of thing I would be a zombie. A little blonde girl, younger than my nieces, smiles out at us confidently. Well, she should be confident. It's clear that she's wearing as much makeup as they could get onto her tiny little face. Her ears are pierced already -- revolting -- and her face and body are perfect miniatures of what the grown-up, 'adult' model is supposed to look like. She's wearing miniature versions of the latest fashions. Which is weird.

It's only comparatively recently, historically, that children have been wearing 'children's' clothes. Before then they were just in miniature versions of the adult fashions. And now, the boundaries are blurring once again. Adults want to stay kids forever -- no responsibilities, no sense of time passing, no commitments. So they dress like overgrown kids. Paula Yates plundered kids' shops for tiny little cutesy t-shirts, starting the whole trend of Lolita-dressing. And look what happened to her. That's the consequence of not growing up, ladies and gentlemen.

But meanwhile, as our society resists aging, we want our kids to be older than they are -- to make us feel less guilty about dressing like them? To ignore the fact that our current model for a woman's body is a sixteen-year-old girl with fake tits? And the consequence of this blurring of the boundaries is that Goldie Hawn dresses like a teenager and shots of children look like kiddie porn.

Go ahead: let it out! Tell us about your own pet peeves on the Tart City Message Board...