Kiss My Knits!

Emily loves M&Ms. Actually, she doesn’t care about the candy, since she’s not big on chocolate (how can she be my daughter?) but she loves the characters.

The main M&Ms site has a link to other corporate M&M sites in other countries. Emily particularly liked France’s flashy site. It has various commercials and fun animations of the M&Ms doing interesting things.

However, one of the interesting things the M&Ms do is pole dance. You heard me. The M&Ms strip. And I get that it’s a cute idea – they do a dance on the catwalk and then unzip their shell and walk around as just a big piece of chocolate. I mean, they’re big round candies, not people, and Em doesn’t get anything about sex yet, so as far as she’s concerned, they’re just dancing and doing something unexpected in removing their shells. However, Em loves dancing so she has REALLY glommed on to this.

Add to this that we’ve recently been talking about money and where it comes from, and why people get paid and it leads to this statement from this morning:

“Green got paid for doing her striptease! She took her shell off.”

I very casually asked her not to say that in school. The last thing I need is a reputation as some kind of deviant mom. Em is always very concerned when I ask her not to say or do something, because she hates to think that she might have done something wrong. I didn’t have time to get into the whys or wherefores of it before school, so I told her I wasn’t upset, it was just that it was a kind of naughty kind of dancing, so perhaps we shouldn’t talk about it at school.

So to placate me, she said, “Green doesn’t really like stripteases, but she has to do it if she wants to get paid.”

And

Em: “Red likes Green with her shell off.”
Me: “Oh, Red likes Green with her shell off or with it on?”
Em: “Yes. That’s why she does her striptease, Red likes her with her shell off.”

Great. Just great. So now Green has to strip to get paid, and she also does it to please her lecherous boyfriend, Red. There’s nothing on the French M&M site about getting paid or about Green being attached to anyone, by the way, so those are just Em’s interpretations of why Green might be doing something that I have said is naughty.

I have no idea how to begin to tackle this. I blame France.