Child Beauty Pageants
Beauty Pageants and Our Children Alost 3 million children, most of them girls, from the ages of 6 months and 17 years compete in beauty pageants annually in America. Competition can be local and national and they compete in categories such as swimwear, talent, costume of your choice, and eveningwear. This is an industry where mothers give her daughter energy drinks for a boost before pageants, 3-year-olds don fake fingernails, and parents regularly spend five thousand dollars on a child's pageant outfit (O’Neill 1). Beauty pageants have negative consequences on America’s youth contestants through the pressure to be “perfect,” media influences, and child sexualization, which results in exhaustion, eating disorders, and body image issues in
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Former child beauty queen Nicole Hunter confirms this theory by explaining that “dressing and acting like a woman at a young age compelled her to prematurely confront her sexuality, which in turn lowered her self-esteem” (Liberman 741). The child pageant circuit concentrates on the ideals of perfection and beauty, with an accompanying focus on sexuality. Innocent girls dressed in skimpy costumes parade and dance, remove pieces of their outfits and wink at judges. Basically, young beauty queens are taught to flirt and manipulate their early sexuality in order to win. Though frequently condemned for such eccentric and damaging practices, the child pageant industry has been gaining success and extensive popularity (Liberman 745). Additionally, reporter Richard Goldstein investigated the JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen, murder case and brought to the surface both our horror at how effectively a child can be constructed as a sexual being and our guilt at the please we take in such a sight (Giroux 50). Her dynamic role in pageants was vastly examined by media after the murder. After JonBenet’s highly publicized murder, the problems of child beauty pageants, especially the degradation of young girls, are first brought to society’s attention. Although many pageant parents argue that the press unfairly focused on the connection of beauty pageants to Jon Benet’s murder, these defenders rarely address the concerns of robbing a child of her virtue by depicting young girls as “sexualized nymphets.” They have little to say about what adolescents actually gain in pageants. Those in favor of the pageants overlook how a child might see herself and her ability to form relationships with society when her feelings of self-worth is defined solely through a belief that
Former child beauty queen Nicole Hunter confirms this theory by explaining that “dressing and acting like a woman at a young age compelled her to prematurely confront her sexuality, which in turn lowered her self-esteem” (Liberman 741). The child pageant circuit concentrates on the ideals of perfection and beauty, with an accompanying focus on sexuality. Innocent girls dressed in skimpy costumes parade and dance, remove pieces of their outfits and wink at judges. Basically, young beauty queens are taught to flirt and manipulate their early sexuality in order to win. Though frequently condemned for such eccentric and damaging practices, the child pageant industry has been gaining success and extensive popularity (Liberman 745). Additionally, reporter Richard Goldstein investigated the JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen, murder case and brought to the surface both our horror at how effectively a child can be constructed as a sexual being and our guilt at the please we take in such a sight (Giroux 50). Her dynamic role in pageants was vastly examined by media after the murder. After JonBenet’s highly publicized murder, the problems of child beauty pageants, especially the degradation of young girls, are first brought to society’s attention. Although many pageant parents argue that the press unfairly focused on the connection of beauty pageants to Jon Benet’s murder, these defenders rarely address the concerns of robbing a child of her virtue by depicting young girls as “sexualized nymphets.” They have little to say about what adolescents actually gain in pageants. Those in favor of the pageants overlook how a child might see herself and her ability to form relationships with society when her feelings of self-worth is defined solely through a belief that