The ugly face of child beauty pageants
Leslie Cannold
May 21, 2011
OPINION
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A child beauty pageant participant.
DO AN internet search on "child beauty pageant" but be prepared. Not just to be depressed by images of overblown, cap-toothed, heavily made-up under-fives but the obvious yet rarely commented upon fact that all these kids are girls.
This issue is red hot in Australia right now, as the June date for the first American-style child pageant to be held in this country approaches. But as psychologists predict future insecurity, eating disorders and depression for participants, and religious pseudo-feminists rhapsodise about lost childhood innocence, it's critical we separate the hyperbolic wheat from the chaff. What is the real problem with child beauty pageants and what, if anything, should be done about them?
Hard data is thin on the ground and so far doesn't support the future mental illness thesis. But what one US study found when interviewing 41 pageant mums – and it is nearly always mothers who push girls as young as one into competition – is that often social class and female life experiences are behind the choice.
Some pageant mums are living out their own dreams of "go[ing] somewhere in life", as one mother put it, rather than being "stuck at home" due to early childbearing. While self-focused female ambition continues to be stigmatised in Western societies – with the ambitious working woman always contrasted unfavourably with the mum who sacrifices her career to stay at home – pageant mums justify their application of false eyelashes or even Botox to their children as evidence of a competitive desire for their daughter to win.
A winning child's booty – including cash, cars, cruises and holidays – was sometimes essential to the income of some families, as was the walking advertisement they provided for family businesses that provided