Lingerie for the day

Amanda Marcotte has a Slate article about young women these days:

Victoria's Secret recently launched a new advertising campaign with the slogan Bright Young Things for their popular Pink line, which is aimed at younger women. It probably would have gone unnoticed, except that Business Insider reported that the CFO of the company admitted that Victoria's Secret wants to sell to high school girls as well as college girls.
"When somebody’s fifteen or sixteen years old, what do they want to be?" Chief Financial Officer Stuart Burgdoerfer said at a conference. "They want to be older, and they want to be cool like the girl in college, and that’s part of the magic of what we do at Pink."
This simple and frankly obvious comment was all people needed to go off into a self-righteous huff about how The Sex would be the ruin of a generation of girls. Angry father Evan Dolive wrote a letter to Victoria's Secret that went viral:

I want my daughter (and every girl) to be faced with tough decisions in her formative years of adolescence. Decisions like: should I be a doctor or a lawyer? Should I take calculus as a junior or a senior? Do I want to go to Texas A&M or the University of Texas, or some Ivy League school? Should I raise awareness for slave trafficking or lack of water in developing nations? There are many, many more questions that all young women should be asking themselves… not will a boy (or girl) like me if I wear a "call me" thong?

Apparently, you can fill out applications to major universities or have boys see you in your underpants, but you can't do both. Having a boyfriend touch you under your clothes is lady-kryptonite that renders you permanently unable to do or care about anything else.
Amy Graff, writing for SFGate, responded in a way that made me wonder if she really did manage to skip her own adolescence entirely:

Moms typically pick up their tweens and teens boxes of underwear at big-box stores like Costco, Target, and Walmart. Retailers like the Gap, Gymboree, and Hanna Anderson also carry these items for young girls. The bras and panties are usually fun, colorful and comfy, certainly not skimpy. You might find unicorns, Hello Kitty, or cotton-tailed bunnies on them.

Color me convinced that, absent the seductive power of a Victoria's Secret ad over the adolescent mind, high school girls would have reacted with delight when Mom insisted on buying them four-packs of Hello Kitty underwear at Costco. "I'm so glad that you still think of me as a ten-year-old in pigtails," the girls would've exclaimed. "I never want to grow up!" But they saw a picture of a model with "pink" written across her rear, and now they're spending all their time looking for underwear that Graff describes as "lingerie you might find at a fetish store in a seedy part of a big city."

Rico says he, too, doubts that any girl over the age of ten would wear anything from Costco...