It’s all about a beautiful dress
Oh yes child (that is, girl) beauty pageants, one of my favorite things. It’s so obviously a good idea to train girls from infancy to act, move, walk, and look as much like prostitutes as possible. Australia had, in its innocence, forgotten to have such things, but they are now on their way their thanks to the helpful interventions of US pageanters.
The anti-pageant groups claim pageants sexualise children
But the pro-pageant people, absurdly, say they don’t. No no, it’s
a positive and fun-filled family occasion that will boost participants’ self-confidence.
Annette Hill, owner of the Texas parent company Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant, who arrives in Australia a week before the pageant, said…”I don’t like golf but I am not going to go to a golf tournament and protest.”
Not relevant. It’s not about liking to do something oneself, it’s about doing things to very young children – very young girls.
”If you are looking at children in a sexual way, you should be ashamed of yourself and something is wrong with you. It’s all about a beautiful dress, a beautiful child with lots of personality performing on stage.”
Right, because the whole thing has nothing whatever to do with sex; the little girls are not dressed in a sexualized way, they are not loaded with makeup, they are performing on stage like any other child singing or reciting a poem.
However, Glenn Cupit, senior lecturer in child development at the University of South Australia, believes the young pageant participants are instructed to dress and behave in an adult way.
”The title is ‘child beauty pageant’ but if you look at the way the children are dressed and required to act, it’s actually a child sexualisation pageant,” he said. ”The children are put into skimpy clothes, they are taught to do bumps and grinds. It’s not looking at children’s beauty. It’s a particular idea of what beauty is, which is based on a highly sexualised understanding of female beauty.”
Exactly like the highly sexualized understanding of female beauty that mandates that female ballet dancers, gymnasts and ice skaters all have to wear the equivalent of bathing suits while male ballet dancers, gymnasts and ice skaters wear long tights and often long sleeves. Women have to look as naked and vulnerable as possible while men have to look as different from that as possible.
I’m off to play some golf.
I have maintained for years that these ‘beauty pageants’ are an egregious form of child abuse, and should be regarded as such in law. ‘Building confidence’ be damned! For the losers, it is quite the opposite. Exploitation of these little girls, pure and simple.
Yes, and also why on formal occasions are men supposed to be well covered (sometimes in several layers – shirt+vest+jacket), while women are to expose as much flesh as possible? And why do we want little girls to emulate that ? And what’s with putting a bikini bathing suit on toddler girls (an instance where the sexualization is accomplished by covering)?
These pageants are repugnant. I cannot think of anything worse to do to a child. The tired excuse that it has nothing to do with sex is worn out. The way these children are dressed, the way they are taught to behave, it has everything to do with sex. They should be banned and those organising them should be charged with child pornography. I hate them.
Theo – exactly. The contrast is so stark it’s laughable – men are to be muffled and women are to be bare. (Men are to swelter in summer; women are to freeze in winter.) It’s the deeply ironic obverse of the sharia version: men can wear T shirts, women have to be bundled like packages.
Well, I’ll disagree about male ballet dancers. Most of the ballet I’ve seen involved topless men in very tight tights and codpieces to protect their junk. How that isn’t sexual, I don’t know. Heck, most ballet is about sex — all that jumping around merely being an artful way of demonstrating sexual attraction.
In any event, I agree with the rest of your assessment regarding these “beauty” pageants. These girls get their teeth capped, wear corsets to sexualize their bodies, and on and on. It’s child abuse, plain and simple, even if the girl “asks” to enter the pageant. Just like it’s pedophilia, pure and simple, even if the victim “asks” to engage in a sexual act.
I think our fascination with it is one of taboo breaking. Children are not supposed to be viewed in this manner, and when they’re deliberately transformed in such a way, it’s hard to look away.
If JonBenet Ramsey had only been another pretty 6-year-old (white) girl, her murder would not still be making (mainly titillating) headlines today. But the media couldn’t resist those “beauty” pageant pictures, and once found, most of the rest of us found it difficult to look away. Which created a feedback loop; photos of the child-woman created more interest which created more media, and on and on.
(BTW: None of that means I find Mrs. Ramsey culpable in any way in her daughter’s murder — nor does it excuse the ghouls who continue feeding on the long-dead child for their own selfish or prurient interests.)
However, I don’t buy the “the losers get low self-esteem” disagreement with this activity, or any other competition, for that matter. Competition is part of life, like it or not. Organized activities (sports, chess, math Olympics, music competitions, tiddly-winks) teach kids both how to win and, more often, how to lose. We do children no favors by insisting that “everyone is a winner” and by placing self-esteem above all other considerations.
Just not this kind of competition.
Ophelia,
Possible URL messup on your main page? In the ‘Latest News’, If I click on the
Child “beauty pageants” arrive in Australia
it offers a not-so-useful page. I suspect you meant for it to point to this article?
astro – oops – no, I probably forgot to include the url.
Yup. Fixed; thanks. (I made a mess of this both ways – forgot the url for the news item and posted the N&C as a news item. Der.)
#Times Ophelia Fail: 1
#Times AntiGnus Fail: 25,423
yeah.. I am keeping count :-)
The best thing one can say of these child pageants is that they demonstrate that “femininity” is a social construct that can be learned, performed and discarded. Of course, no one is pointing this out to the little girls, but what they are really learning to be is drag queens.
The difference between “Toddlers and Tiaras” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” (two US television programs about two kinds of competitions) is that the contestants in the latter are adult males who compete of their own volition to display their skill at a performance art. The queens aren’t trying to please heterosexual men, either.
Very interesting take on this Ophelia – thanks for it. I just want to say that when I was a ballet dancer the boys all wore leotards and very short shiny blue hot-pants. So perhaps in Britain it’s better =P.
I have, from time to time, watched episodes of the reality show Little Miss Perfect, which follows a series of contestants for a “glam” beauty contest for little girls. I was curious about the entire set-up; the people who ran it, the kids who performed in it, the parents and families and coaches who supported it — and what the heck they did. What the hell could they all be thinking? Were they thinking at all?
It’s a different world, yes, but, surprisingly, not really as disturbing as I anticipated. Some of the mothers were pushy: some of the girls were brats. I thought the exaggerated cutesey-cute was pretty sicky-sick and the ultra-femininity certainly philosophically problematic: I don’t endorse these pageants and I certainly wouldn’t encourage any daughter of mine to enter. But, within the confines of the competition, there was still some creativity, effort, discipline, and personal enjoyment involved. I’m not so sure the girls were all getting the negative messages we think they must have been getting. It’s a bit more complicated, I think. Like most things.
What I really didn’t sense much was any overt sexualization of the little girls — other than of course the dress-up and girly-girl part, where they play-acted being like their teen idols. The atmosphere was more like one of those tacky, overdone weddings where the bride arrives draped in lace froth in a white carriage as trumpets play (though the talent part could get pretty rough-and-tumble.) Not sleezy so much as cheezy.
Of course, reality shows are usually anything but, and the producers doubtless edited for the effect they wanted: strange, but with its own flavor of “wholesomeness.” Maybe. I don’t know. The most obvious sexuality in the entire series was the gay male pageant director, who was absolutely in love with the “magic” of it all. At least some of the kids seemed to be having fun, and the pageants probably weren’t giving them any silly messages they wouldn’t have picked up at home. There was a bizarre kind of fascination to it. It was hard to look away…
Well, if the pictures of the reigning miss prostitot are any indication, there’s plenty of over sexualization going on. Did you see that photo? Positively creepy. Not just sexualized, but Barbie-ized. The retouching is so extensive it literally looks like a pop art airbrush painting of a Barbie doll. Retouching six-year-old girls?
Oh I saw that photo all right.
I can remember a faint creepy fascination with all this girly stuff when I was pre-pubescent, which was always at war with deeply rooted tomboyism. It weirds me out to think I could easily have gone the other way.
In one way it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter. It’s sexy, all this polarization; I get that. But the team I get to be on is polarized as fragile, delicate, feeble, hobbled, passive, etc etc etc. If life were all sex it wouldn’t matter, but since it’s not………I think the girly stuff is a trap.
I seriously wish I could see women gymnasts and skaters and ballet dancers in androgynous clothes looking strong as well as graceful. They’re athletes but that’s disguised (somewhat) by the presentation – they float and waft and flutter.
I agree totally. I mean, I find regular beauty pageants to be tacky enough as it is. But at least those have adult women in them, women who presumably have the ability to think about it more thoroughly, put the whole thing into perspective, and either stay or walk away. Child beauty pageants are really concerning to me, because they appear to be sending a message, um, really of shallowness, of deriving one’s sense of value or identity or self-esteem or whatever just from resembling certain standards of sex appeal.
I don’t know about the pedophilia factor. It’s creepy, but I don’t know if there’s really a link to child abuse so I’ll withhold judgment.
But I do think that there’s probably a link to something else, which is this idea that little girls have to be ready to grow up and find a good man, this pre-feminist idea that the only way for a woman to advance herself is by playing the gold digger.
Certainly in my mother’s case, she was taught a lot about cooking and cleaning by her parents, and her weight was closely scrutinized. No support for the good grades she had in high school (she got a C once and cried for an hour, but only because she was hard on herself; her family didn’t even notice). No support for going to any particular college, except that she might meet the right guy in college. Basically, the way she was raised, was to make her as appealing a purchase as possible for some man who would come along to support her.
This seems similar to what I see out of some of the parents who push their daughters into these pageants really hard. It’s this idea that they desperately have to fit this role to succeed in life. Also explains something about why these events are so much more popular in the American South.
To be fair, I do have some cousins who seem to be OK after going through this sort of thing. One cousin was Miss Teen Colorado, but after that was all over, she focused on her career, with the whole pageant thing just being a weird quirk in her past. Another is fairly young (I’d say about 10 this year?), and has a difficult family life (neither parent is on stable financial or mental health territory). She’s a sweet and pretty bright kid though; hopefully she manages to find enough outside support to get by.
But it’s so strange. At worst, this sort of thing distorts how young girls see the world. At best, it’s an obsession with an activity that in most cases will just get more and more irrelevant to their later lives.
As an aside, I do have to note another important difference between beauty pageants and drag shows. A swimsuit contest is based around getting a better look at what a woman’s body really looks like by putting as little covering on it as possible. The physical appearance aspect of a drag show is much more about effective use of costuming.
And here’s a story about an MIT student who financed her education with her beauty pageant winnings:
On the one hand, good for her for being able to capitalize on her beauty to further her education. On the other hand, what does it say about a society in which this is a necessary strategy?
Kevin, I gently disagree with your point on low self-esteem. At least with sports and other activities, you can practice and perhaps get better. If you are forced into pageants and never win because you aren’t “pretty enough”, then that’s another matter. Put yourself in that situation for just a moment, hoping and hoping that this time they will think you’re pretty….and again your name is never called. How can that not affect your self-esteem negatively?
I agree that this is a form of child abuse. It’s not cute and it’s not entertaining. It is what it is and that is blatant sexualization of children. Plain and simple. At best it’s a sick fascination with living vicariously through your children – the attention, the praise – the parents eat that shit up more than the kids.
What parent could make their 3 yr old little girl sit through five HOURS of hair and makeup and costume? What parent could take pride in seeing their toddler paraded around as a swimsuit model? What parent wouldn’t wonder if there wasn’t some danger in exploiting their child in such a manner? It’s just really beyond me.
Plus she needed to do 99 more of them to get the tuition money. And win.
Janine: You’re probably right about the “pretty” thing.
Though why a parent would subject an obviously “third place” child to such treatment over and over again is beyond me — but then, my parents were normal. They let me choose what to try, and didn’t berate me when I lost or when I decided enough was enough.
But I’ll concede that pretty is a whole different kettle of fish, being more “who you are” instead of “what you do”.
All the more reason to not subject anyone to such overtly public subjective evaluations.
Hhmmm … it says child so i wonder what the organizers take would be if a boy was entered …
Since there is so little difference between little boys and little girls at that age, they might not even notice (or maybe not until the swimsuit competition). I wonder if the applications even ask for gender, or just assume the contestants are female
And when the “horrible” secret was revealed there would be shock, indignation, and an ensuing tempest of pooh-flinging, like this story of a woman who aided and abetted her 5-year-old to dress up as a female for Halloween:
http://nerdyapplebottom.com/2010/11/02/my-son-is-gay/
Retired police officer Meg McGowan, on the ‘Australians Against Child Beauty Pageants’ Facebook page (emphasis mine):
From here:
http://stilllifewithcat.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-on-beauty-pageants-for-children.html
Or like the J Crew exec who (omigod!!) painted her boy kid’s toenails pink. Aaaaaaaaaaaah gender confusion, call the cops!
Yikes, skepticlawyer – thanks for that. (I wonder if Law&Order SVU has done anything on this. It’s actually quite good on the roots of violence against women. Not surprising given the subject matter, but surprising given the politics of most tv.)
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