Once upon a time, the upwardly-mobile, social climbing bogan would be content to live their life in a self-consciously pointless quest to emulate whichever celebrity topped whichever magazine’s ‘sexiest’ list. This was a relatively harmless pursuit. Sexy celebrities generally were quite sexy, and an ambitious bogan is less threatening that an aimless, directionless one.
However, since ‘the good old days’, two things happened. Being ‘sexy’ became synonymous with ‘have recorded a sex tape, and present themselves thus’, and bogans developed a taste for dressing their children as adults. The latter of these is usually the result of an upbringing wherein the bogan’s parents could not afford whatever off-the-rack Just Jeans low riders were in amongst 12 year-olds at the time. Today, the nouveau bogan is in a less parlous financial situation. Hence, dressing their primary-schoolers in hipster jeans and crop-tops is justified by a need to ensure that their precious offspring are not teased at school as they were.
The result is that, in an effort to have their children fit in, and now with the extra leeway afforded by a booming economy and low-priced clothing outlets like Supre, little Maddylyn and Bylynda are now dressed like Paris Hilton. On a bender. With Britney Spears. By this, bogan parents consider themselves ‘cool’ in the eyes of their pre-teen daughter, with whom they wish to remain ‘BFFs’.
This sexualising of children is amplified by the inherent competitiveness between bogan parents, who equate preparing their kids for a lifetime of fluffing the high school dropout with being ‘cool’ and ‘adorable’. Thus, we see children strutting around in their ‘Legal-Ish’ T-shirt, decorated, with delicious ‘irony’, in silver glitter, thereby making it the preserve of the 10 year-old girl. Couple this with a skirt last seen on the members of Tatu, and it is bogan parent nirvana. Not that this is the end of it. Indeed, it has moved to the point where newborn boys are proudly displayed wearing a t-shirt avowing that they are a ‘tits man’.
Geddit?