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Dallas Morning News
Dallas, TX
March 28, 2008
The Living China Dolls
to mothers in Dallas and Texas

It is a well-known fact that beauty pageants have become a means for celebrating beauty. Beauty pageants can give women, and more recently girls, an excuse to make themselves look as beautiful as they can and win prizes for their looks. However, I think there’s more behind these pageants than innocent fun and rejoicing in beauty. There may even be more harm than good coming out of these pageants. Please join me in looking at how child beauty pageants can exploit these children, stifle their natural beauty and lead them to ruination.
First of all, child beauty pageants can be used to exploit these child beauties. As we saw in the murder of child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey, child beauty pageants are screaming for sex-offenders to come and “choose a girl.” Names, cities, states and ages are all given when the contestants are introduced. With this information, there’s nothing stopping people with sick minds from following a family home from a pageant and violating their daughter. There are 100,000 children under the age of 12 who participate in beauty pageants across the country. That’s 100,000 children who are being exposed to any crazy person who may choose to drop by. Child beauty pageants can also induce child abuse. The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment and Adoption Reform Act defines child abuse as, “the physical or mental injury, sexual abuse or exploitation of a child under circumstances which indicate the child’s health or welfare is harmed or threatened.” Could parents be exploiting their child’s beauty, simply for their own pleasure or gain? It is very possible. As one mother stated at a beauty pageant, “My daughter looks like Barbie. I tell her to exploit it. This is your life; take what you have and run with it.” This mom seems to be leading her daughter to ruin. Not only is the mother exploiting her daughter, but she is also teaching her daughter to exploit herself.
Secondly, the beauty being celebrated in child beauty pageants in particular is not real. The beauty of a girl is found in her real eyes, her real teeth, her real hair, her real lips, and her real self. This is the beauty a mother sees in her daughter, and this is the beauty that may lead mothers to enter their daughter(s) in beauty pageants. In these beauty pageants, a whole different beauty is exalted. This beauty is found in man-made things. Girls are plastered with lipstick, mascara, blush and eye shadow. Sometimes even spray tans are used. If a young girl’s baby tooth falls out at an inconvenient time and doesn’t have time to grow back in before a pageant, a fake tooth is fitted. Or say a girl’s hair isn’t yet long enough to “curl like Barbie’s.” Bring on the hair extensions. All this can take about 2.5 hours to do. In the end, the girls’ natural beauty is being stifled by cosmetics. When Hilary Levey, a grad student at Harvard, and a woman who has been exposed to beauty pageants all her life, saw this, she commented, “Things like this showed me that these are not just contests to judge natural beauty.”
Lastly, some parents believe they are helping their children become more confident by entering them in beauty pageants. But whose self-esteem is really being boosted here? It is true that meeting new people at these child beauty pageants may help shy children. But imagine being a two-year-old girl who has had little exposure to people outside of her own family. The exposure she has had, though not particularly negative, was absolutely terrifying. Every time she meets new people she clings to her parents, begging them not to put her down. Now imagine being thrust into a crowd of about 120 girls aging from 2-6 years as well as their parents and siblings. Would you be inclined to open up, or clam up? Besides this, these girls are becoming sickeningly dependent on their appearances, and their parents, to get them through the rest of their lives. When A&E Network interviewed 10-year-old Sabra Johnson, she not only left out her future schooling plans, focusing solely on her modeling career, but also would look to her mother for reassurance after every sentence. Other girls ages 8-10 were also interviewed by A&E and not one of them mentioned their education plans; all expect to go into modeling. But according to the Better Business Bureau, few child pageant winners are actually able to get modeling jobs when they mature. These child beauties are being fed false hopes and dreams. The effects can be devastating. “Being a little Barbie doll says your body has to be a certain way and your hair has to be a certain way,” says William Pinsof, a clinical psychologist and the president of the Family Institute at Northwestern University, “In girls particularly, this can unleash a whole complex of destructive self-experiences that can lead to eating disorders and all kinds of body distortions in terms of body image.” So not only could girls end up throwing their lives away in a wild goose chase, but they could destroy themselves doing it.
So, are child beauty pageants really as harmless as they may appear? Well, if you think dealing with eating disorders, child abuse, and the loss of the innocent beauty of a child is not a big deal, then I suppose the answer is “yes”; child beauty pageants really aren’t particularly harmless. On the other hand, these issues are often considered to be “real issues,” and people tend to want to do something about them. Well something can be done. Laws can be changed, if not to eliminate child beauty pageants, to control these pageants. One such law is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which exempts child beauty pageants from child labor laws. This is why girls sometimes spend seven hours a week or more preparing for a pageant. If a limit were placed on how much time could be spent on preparations, girls would have more time for schoolwork. In our fair Lone Star State, there are no laws against beauty pageants, but that could change, could it not? So I challenge you to at least consider these points. Shall you be called to action, to fight for these little ones? Or will you choose to move on, and leave these young beauties to their own ruin?

Kisses,
Abbsters