Not on My Wish List: Hello Kitty Undies

While shopping for my niece online, I came across a product I really, really don't need for Christmas. This would be the perfect present for a frenemy to buy me if they want to make sure my partner keeps a chaste distance from me in the year 2009.

Never mind that I'm a cat lover. Hello Kitty is not a cat; she is a marketing juggernaut with only a passing resemblance to actual felines. I think she's freaky looking, with those blank, fixed eyes and that pink bow that looks like it's surgically attached to her head.

As if the front view weren't alarming enough, the panties feature Hello Kitty peering up from one butt cheek.
On a more serious note, I think this product creeps me out because it so industriously blurs the line between childhood and adult sexuality. I feel similarly about schoolgirl fetishes, which I think eroticize immature girls, even if it's a fifty-year-old woman sexing herself up in knee socks and a plaid skirt. Making adult women "sexy" in a child's costume is just the reverse of turning little girls into sex objects. (Remember those Hooters shirts for toddler girls?)

I'm generally pretty non-judgmental about people's kinks. Most of 'em don't bother me even if they don't do anything for me. But I see the eroticization of fake little-girliness as in a wholly different category than, say, a fursuit fetish. (Go google that yourself if you really must know.)