Phenomenon – Child Pageants
(People in Melbourne protesting against the staging
of a child beauty pageant in 2011, taken from http://theconversation.edu.au/little-miss-innocent-anxious-adults-await-australias-first-child-beauty-pageant-1209)
There is a lot of public opinion that beauty pageants
(for adult women) encourages sexual objectification of women and destroys
everything that feminists stand for. This is much worse for children: childhood
is supposedly the age of innocence, yet we pit young girls against one another
in a contest of superficial beauty. We incorporate the wrong messages about
beauty by imposing our “ideals” of beauty on their young fragile minds,
possibly leading to more problems of anorexia and other health problems in
young girls, as well as a desire to undergo plastic surgery.
What exactly is the point of organizing beauty
pageants for children in the first place? What does this tell us about our
society, our concept of beauty, and the kind of values and culture we want to
teach our children? I hope to be able to find deeper answers to these questions
by probing further into this topic.
