Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Child Beauty Contests

The little girl to the left is a child beauty contestant from the film "Little Miss Sunshine". In filming the beauty contest scenes, "Little Miss Sunshine" forewent using actors and instead relied on girls who actually do compete in America's child beauty pageants.

You'll note the little girl is wearing over 17.3 pounds of makeup, has a sprayed on artificial tan and is dressed to appear sexy. From what I understand, that's all true to life. The girls in real pageants really are made up like that.

Now, I would think if you just had to have a contest in which you judged children's beauty, then you should judge their beauty as children -- not as fake adults. That's to say, I think kids are naturally beautiful as kids, and that dressing them up as sexy adults at best denatures their natural beauty. So, I wonder why anyone would do it?

What do you think?



My thanks to Eolake for inspiring this post.

4 comments:

Webs said...

I think the contests are fairly demented and the parents that force, I mean put, their kids through it are just as demented or F*ed up, living out their dreams through the child, or both. And it was nice to see Little Miss Sunshine bring it all to light so to speak.

I think another problem with the contest is that it teaches the child there is no such thing as natural beauty. What else is the child to learn after going through such BS?

B said...

Child beauty pageants are uber-creepy.

Anonymous said...

I think it's frightening. Trying to make kids look sexy, sexualizing kids... take it just one degree further and isn't that like, against the law?

Paul Sunstone said...

Oh come on Webs, Brendan and Amuirin! Dressing up little girls to look like sex objects is "demented", "creepy", and borderline illegal? Next thing you know, you'll be telling me we should protect kids from drug traffickers or keep them out of war zones! Just where is your sense of letting the kids have some fun these days?