Nina Funnell writes that girls are learning to read their value as a person in terms of how their physical appearance is received by others.

“Destiny enjoys singing, dancing and, of course, pageantry” announces the beauty pageant’s MC as a made-up blonde in a white gown sashays across the stage. Did I mention that Destiny is a five year old child? Welcome to the world of Toddlers and Tiaras, an American reality TV series that follows the lives of children and their families as they prepare for and compete in beauty pageants.

Having recently sat through a Toddlers and Tiaras marathon (as research for a book chapter) I now consider myself an expert on winning children’s beauty pageants.

The first thing you need is a pushy and obnoxious mother who has no problem with screaming at her child. In one episode a mother screeches “Flirt! You’re not flirting!” as her six year old daughter practices her routine. “Stand up straight, suck your tummy in!” directs another. In one episode a girl cries in pain as her mother attempts to force an earring through a closed up ear piercing. And another ignores her five year child’s cries of protest as her eyebrows are forcibly waxed adding that her daughter “is just a bit, kind of terrified” because the last time “the wax was way too hot and it actually ripped off her skin”.

The second thing you need to do is fake-it-up. From the age of about two girls begin to wear fake hair, fake eyelashes and fake teeth sets (known as “flippers”). Almost all girls get fake tans with a number owning their own spray tanning machines at home. One four year old is taken on “diva days” where she is “treated” to facials, manicures and pedicures. Others have waxing, teeth whitening and chemical hair straightening as well as weaves and hair extensions.

And then there is the all-important clothing. “Glitz” outfits – dresses decked out with diamantes and other jewels – cost between five and ten thousand dollars. One mother admits that she has spent more than $15 000 that year alone on pageants, adding that if she saved the money her family “could probably live in a bigger home, but [winning Miss America] just feels like my daughter’s destiny.” Her daughter is only three. Other mothers talk about taking “second pageant jobs” to pay for the expensive and numerous competitions.

Then there is the cost of hair and make-up, professional photography and photo retouching (airbrushing), and the price of pageant coaches who train the girls. Brandi, a thirty-one year old Prozac-popping coach who thanks God for bringing her to pageantry, offers her six year old clients bonus advice on picking up boys, “I tell them to get with the smart boys- the nerdy ones- because when they grow up, they’re going to be the rich ones, and you can be a trophy wife”.

On pageant day parents wear tacky customized t-shirts displaying their child’s name and photo. Three year olds have “before and after” shots displayed on the show like on diet product advertisements. One mother feeds her child three cans of red-bull energy drink before competing to keep her “perky” during competition. A six month old girl already has seventy pageant titles to her name. Girls perform sexualised dance routines imitating MTV video clips. And boys compete too. One ‘Little Mr’ is introduced by the MC as “Matthew”, adding that “Matthew’s favourite person is his daddy in heaven”.

While the show may sound exploitative and crass, it is actually documenting the appalling and exploitative behaviour of stage parents who live vicariously through their children’s achievements. It’s incredibly cringe worthy to watch but the show offers an important window onto a world which many of us are only aware of through the adult outputs of the industry in the form of Miss Universe winners and runner-ups.

Meanwhile, the media continues to laud individuals such as Miranda Kerr and Jennifer Hawkins (and to a lesser extent Jessinta Campbell and Rachael Finch). These women, as supposed role models, teach little girls (and stage parents everywhere) that the easiest way for a girl in today’s society to achieve fame, fortune and success is to win a beauty competition.

It’s hardly surprising that little girls are now feeling anxious about their bodies at an earlier and earlier age. Nor is it surprising that they are learning to read their value as a person in terms of how their physical appearance is received by others. Seeing little girls being judged, scrutinized and assessed over their appearance is truly distressing. Even worse, the fact that this process is not only normalized but actually celebrated by their parents is just horrific.

Equating a girl’s self worth with her appearance is a dangerous and destructive game and one that the media encourages girls to play from a very early age. Parents should want to protect children from this message, not teach it to them.

Oppose US child beauty pageants coming to Australia

If you haven’t watched it already, this ACA video is a must-see. It provides further evidence for the sheer ugliness – and harm – of child pageant culture. We meet the American woman behind plans to bring this toxic child exploitation fest to Australia in July – and the Melbourne woman who will run it here. She is already preparing her young daughters for entry. One reveals she doesn’t like wearing make-up – but that is clearly of insignificant to her mother who is too busy organising her daughter’s body waxing to care. Someone who does care is Julie Gale, my colleague and friend from Kids Free 2B Kids who also appears here.

See also ‘Mums to protest bringing US-style beauty pageants to Melbourne’  (It’s not just mums protesting of course).

Teaching girls their value is in their physical beauty

Many readers will have seen the documentary Toddlers and Tiaras revealing the child exploitation that is the US beauty pageant industry. A five year old begging not to have her eyebrows ripped out. Little girls preening, strutting, pouting, beckoning to the judges ‘come here baby’, kissing their finger and pressing it to their backsides in a gesture indicating they are smoking hot, the suggestive dance routines and sexualised costumes, parents investing thousands of dollars to turn their daughters into big haired, grotesquely made-up sexy dolls. In the words of  Melissa Wardy of Pigtail Pals: 

Teaching young girls a very narrow version of beauty, transforming their bodies so that their beauty can be measured and judged, or to use their sexualized bodies to earn money for the family is disgusting…When you add to this the chemically dangerous spray tans, butt glue, nail glue, eyelash glue, hairspray, and cosmetics applied to these tiny, developing bodies, it is not a stretch to say these pageant programs are both emotionally and physically abusive.

After viewing some of the episodes online I thought – at least this is one toxic US export that hasn’t infected our shores.

I can’t think that any more. Because this toxic pageant culture is on its way to Australia. Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants will open for business in Melbourne in July.

As Elissa Doherty and Kate Jones at the Herald Sun report:

The July pageant, for babies to adults, costs a minimum of $295, which includes a compulsory beauty competition, modelling and make-up workshops.

Optional extras include tanning, dressing like a celebrity for $50 and a photo and autograph session with American beauty pageant star, five-year-old Eden Wood…

Melbourne-based Kristin Kyle, helping organise the event, said it was already attracting interest from across Australia and New Zealand. The winner will take home a laptop, a rhinestone crown, a 1.5m trophy, an “official supreme royalty banner” and a stuffed teddy bear.

In its marketing material, the event claims to foster a “positive, fun-filled atmosphere” by encouraging self-confidence, education and “striving to be your very best”.

Making girls conform to stereotyped norms of female beauty

Here’s what I had to say about child beauty pageants on Channel 7’s Morning Show today. Naturally I disagreed with the pageant mum who said it was about “Playing Barbies” and “It’s what girls should do” and the Sunshine Coast pageant organiser who likened pageants to “sport” and said they were about being “beautiful and having fun”.

Collective Shout is planning action against child beauty pageants in Australia. Check the website for details and updates.

Commercial exploitation of the female body exposed at Endangered Species Conference

Just came across this piece  in The New Internationalist and had to share it with you. It’s an outstanding unpacking of the normalisation of rigid norms of female beauty, which have been exported around the world. Written by Giedre Steikunaite,  it’s a report on the Endangered Species Summit held recently in London to challenge the toxic culture that teaches women and girls to hate their own bodies. Wish I’d been there.

The Beauty Myth…and madness

‘The human body is now a product,’ said photographer Wendy Hicks. So we buy and sell ourselves, constantly remake our bodies, blindly believing we are ‘improving’ them. This commercial exploitation of the body has become a norm; once normalized in a society, it’s taken for granted…

So why are we doing it? Because we’ve been sold a myth, a beauty myth. And because it makes somebody very, very rich. ‘People without problems are not commercially viable,’ said Rosi Prescott, CEO of YMCA. A happy person is a bad consumer. Thus, a business lesson: create a problem, convince me I have it, and then sell me the solution – voilà! …

The problem is not limited to the Global North. ‘Body hatred is becoming one of the West’s hidden exports,’ Orbach wrote in her book Bodies. It’s a new form of corporal colonization. ‘We’re sending body hatred all around the world’…

‘We are living in Marshall McLuhan’s global village, sharing many of the same images worldwide. They become identity markers, framing our streets, our magazines, our look, providing a sense of continuity in a befuddling and fast-changing environment’…

‘When interviewing young girls I found that they felt there was just no alternative, only the mainstream image,’ said Natasha Walter, author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It’s an issue of diversity: you’re in trouble if you can’t see your own reflection out there; it affects you negatively. We have to mainstream the ‘alternative’ (ie the real image).

Read the full article here

‘We want girls and women to see their bodies as a place they live from, not as a complicated place of fear.’

And here’s the opening speech to the summit by psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic Susie Orbach. It’s short, but so powerful.

Not satirising the culture. It is the culture

Critics of the December-January French Vogue photo spread featuring little girls as mini women decorated in gaudy make up, swathed in luxurious adult women’s clothing, assembled on beds, fawning on animal skin rugs, pouting bright red moist lips under a banner ‘Cadeaux’ – little presents to be unwrapped – just don’t get it.

The 15-page colour shoot of little-girls-as-grown-up-women is just parody, an incisive cutting-edge commentary on the culture. And we’re all just too dumb to realise that because we’re overdosing on moral panics and thinking of the children (a mocking phrase applied to those of us advocating for children).

That’s according to Jenna Saunders, in her Jezebel piece yesterday titled ‘French Vogue’s Kiddie Spread is Misunderstood’. Saunders writes:

But it’s also obvious from the over-the-top styling and the overall lurid quality that this story is a parody and a critique of the fashion industry’s unhealthy interest in young girls, not an endorsement or a glamourization of it

When a stylist — Melanie Huynh — and a photographer — Sharif Hamza — somehow get it in their minds to viciously satirize an industry that so fetishizes youth that it pretends adolescents are preferable substitutes for grown women? And when a respected fashion magazine — Vogue Paris — has the balls to publish their horrifying Toddlers in Tiaras-on-speed work? When that happens, cue the outrage! Won’t someone think of the children…

But this spread is a not-so-subtle fuck you to our culture’s unhealthy obsession with youth (in general) and the fashion industry’s (in particular), and to the commodification of childhood that comes with both. Is this story “tasteful”? Hell no. Does it “sell” the clothes? Not really. Is it pleasant to look at? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good for us to see.

I don’t accept that this is really a parody or irony or an f**k- you to the culture. It is the culture. Vogue is not critiquing or de-constructing, it is embedding sexualised and adultified notions of children into the culture, inviting the viewer to ‘read’ the images of little girls – in this case, Lea, Prune and Thylane – as mini-women, therefore as much older and more (sexually?) knowing, than they actually are.

Patty Huntington over at Frockwriter was first to publish the photos online, setting off a global frenzy of interest. She described “heavily made-up children draped seductively over chairs, daybeds and an animal skin rug, with their legs and décolletages bared, like child prostitutes in a brothel…”

Saunders is just speculating. She doesn’t quote anyone involved as saying that satire was the intention. No one from Vogue has said “It’s parody people, don’t you get it?” A bold, cutting edge editor would be prepared to go out and defend the shoot against critics, but that hasn’t happened (in fact editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld resigned shortly after the photos went viral, which may of course be a coincidence).

Guest editor Tom Ford is on the front cover, standing behind model Daphne Groeneveld, aged 14 when the shot was taken. Is that meant to be ironic too?

I wonder if the irony will be lost on the kind of men who enjoy prepubescent girls groomed to look like adult women in high heels and with things in their mouths?

I agree with this comment on Huntington’s blog (in response to another commenter who couldn’t see a problem with the images):

You see nothing overtly sexual about a smoldering look through one’s upper eyelashes, about glossy wet pouted lips slightly parted, about bare legs tilted sideways on a disheveled bed, about a silky top plunging well below where the cleavage would be? If any of these looks, coupled with that clothing/makeup, were from a grown woman in a nightclub, the message would be pretty clear. You cannot just separate that kind of body language from the usual meaning just because the body performing it is a child. Yes kids play dressup. Innocent dressup is full of mismatched odds and ends, smeared makeup, plastic shoes, giggles and silliness. It is a pretend parody of the adult experience devoid of the adult understandings. Look into their eyes, THIS is not giggles and silliness. This is the inappropriate double whammy of insinuating adults are no good unless they look like a child, and children are no good unless they look like adults. It is pedophiliac style grooming of the reading public, so slowly and gently you don’t know when the line has been crossed….

Even if these images were created as a commentary on the fashion industry, a critique of the ‘getting older younger’ phenomenon in (or imposed on) children, the reality is they have still used children make their point. Labelling it artistic or clever, doesn’t make it okay. As writer and commentator Nina Funnell wrote to me:

So what is the standard here? Is it acceptable to dress children up in sexualised clobber, photograph them in a sexualised manner but only if the purpose is satirical? Do the children understand the satire that they are being used to create? How does the photo session impact on them? What precautions- if any- did the photographers, stylists and make-up artists put in place to protect the kids? Did they explain it was just ‘fun dress-ups’ for a day? And even if they did, what’s to stop a six year old from walking away with the message that when they look older and dress in a more sexual manner they get more praise, attention and money compared to when they look like their every day self?  If we are going to say that child exploitation/ sexualisation is inappropriate then we have to be a bit consistent in that. We can’t say it’s inappropriate if it’s being done to sell a product, but fine if it’s done for ‘artistic merit’ or ‘cultural commentary’ purposes.

Nice of Jezebel to go in to bat for French Vogue. But many of us aren’t buying it. Vogue is not outside the culture. It is the culture.

Girls’ mag wrap September-October issues

For many girls, the magazines they read are their lifestyle bibles. How should they look, dress, act and relate? What’s important in life? Who should they look up to? My analysis of the September and October issues of Girlfriend, Dolly, Girlpower, Totalgirl, Disney Girl and Little Angel shows that girls are being delivered a fairly one-dimensional view of girl/young womanhood. The emphasis is on looks, fashion, beauty practices, gossip, celebrity culture and consumerism. While there are a few redeeming features, for example a little more body diversity in Dolly and features on real girls who have overcome difficulties in life to achieve their goals, in Dolly and Girlfriend, overall the message remains normative, limited and limiting.

This review was recently published as a guest blog on the Generation Next website.

Extreme Dolce & Gabanna photo shop exposed

This image:

Took two days to turn into this:

The contrast is striking, highlighting once again how common is the false portray of cultural icons. It’s almost shocking to see the untouched image, so familiar have we become with the extreme doctored versions; with the fantasy sold to us by the celebrity/beauty/fashion industries.

Even if many women know that the images they see daily have been heavily photo-shopped, the message these false reflections broadcast is: this is how you should look. The very act of photo-shopping Madonna so dramatically tells us Madonna is not OK: even she needs correction.

The re-created image tells us something else, and that is that the ageing process is unacceptable. How is Madonna supposed to accept the realities of being an older woman, when those who are using her won’t?

This is what I had to say about it on Channel 7’s Morning Show this week.

Or leave you permanently disfigured

“It’s an industry that has developed in health care which has nothing to do with health care” – Prof Merrilyn Walton

If you didn’t see 60 Minutes segment ‘The Beauty Trap’ on Sunday night, here it is:

The program tells the tragic story of Lauren James, who died three years ago at the age of 26 following an $8000 liposuction procedure on her thighs in a Melbourne clinic. We hear from her bereft parents and boyfriend.

It also tells the story of Kerry who suffered life-long disfigurement as a result of undergoing a breast lift as part of a $25,000 “Mum’s Makeover”, also in Melbourne. Kerry bravely tells her story and shows the extent of the mutilation of both her breasts. This extract from the transcript:

KERRY MULLINS: I was in there for three months, and each and every other day they’d take me down to theatre and so I had 22 operations all up, and every second day they would cut it away, cut it away, cut it away until it was just a big hole in my chest.

TARA BROWN: How were you coping, mentally?

KERRY MULLINS: Um, all I kept thinking was I just want to live. There was a couple of times I didn’t want to wake up, but I was in so much pain and I did looked so disfigured that I didn’t want to wake up…

KERRY MULLINS: That is my right breast, and that is my left breast and they are the scars I’m left with.

TARA BROWN: This is not easy for you, is it?

KERRY MULLINS: No, it isn’t, it isn’t, but I just want women to be aware that is they’re going to consider having plastic surgery that they look and have a look at me and see what the outcome can be, and this is what you can end up looking like.

TARA BROWN: How do you feel about your body today?

KERRY MULLINS: Um, like a freak. I’m disgusted. Even when I wash myself, I feel disgusted that I even have to even wash that area and touch that area.

TARA BROWN: Do you think you’ll ever lose that feeling?

KERRY MULLINS: No, never, never ever.

Professor Merrilyn Walton, who has investigated Australia’s cosmetic surgery industry in Australia, says it is “an industry that has developed in health care that has nothing to do with health care.” She also says Australia’s industry is less regulated than elsewhere.

It is time the industry was made accountable for preying on women, enticing them with false promises and playing down the risks. There should be a major overhaul of the industry with tighter regulation and accountability.

Promoting white supremacy

Here at the MTR blog we’re not exactly what you’d call fans of the global corporation Unilever.

Unilever has been named and shamed here before for its sexist advertising through the Lynx/Axe brand as highlighted here and here, for its hypocrisy in promoting so-called “real beauty” through its Dove brand while presenting women in degrading and objectifying ways, for its Slimfast products promoting rapid weight loss (because real beauty only comes in size skinny) and for promoting skin whitening products to dark-skinned women (Unilever – to the rescue of dark not skinny women everywhere!).

Now Unilever has taken its white supremacist ways a step further, with a new Facebook application which enables Indian men to lighten their profiles, while at the same time promoting its Vaseline brand of skin lightening products. The company spruiks the product using a Bollywood star whose face is split in half, showing the (unsightly) dark side and the (magically transformed) light side.

Unilever appears to have no shame. One of its earlier skin bleaching products was called “White Beauty”. Playing on certain racial insecurities by telling dark skinned people that they can never really be beautiful – that’s what Unilever is doing. For some great Unilever dark skin despising action, check out this You Tube clip.

Of course, it’s not just Unilever. Garnier, Nivea and L’Oreal (‘because you’re worth white skin’. OK, I made that up) do the same.

These products promote ethnocentric stereotypes about the superiority of white people.

Sociology professor T. K. Oommen at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi told Agence France Presse:

Lighter skin is associated with the ruling social class, with wealth, with general betterment. Skin lightening creams for women have been a cosmetics staple in India for decades, so when a men’s cream debuted a few years ago, its success was almost ensured.

Even Indian children are internalising these dark-skin shaming messages, with 12-14 year olds constituting 13 percent of India’s skin whitening market.

The products are also dangerous, causing kidney damage and thin skin. They have also been connected to cancer (see: The hidden costs of skin whitening products).

Indian dermatologist Dr Aamer Khan has seen a rise in women suffering from serious skin conditions as a result of skin bleaching.

“I see patients with hypo-pigmentation (loss of pigment) resulting in white patches and hyper-pigmentation leading to darker areas – both are caused by skin bleaching agents. People buy these creams that offer false hopes, but the fact is, there is no safe way to whiten your skin. There needs to be more stringent moderating of these products, as it is a very serious problem.”

Read more:

 ‘India’s myth of fair-skinned beauty’  published in The Guardian this week.

Spot on commentary here which illustrates the hypocrisy involved by placing the Dove onslaught ad about airbrushing beside that for Unilever’s ‘Fair & Lovely’ whitening cream.

This is a perfect quote illustrating the hypocrisy, also from The Guardian:

…in an era of increasing transparency, parent companies like Unilever can’t hide behind a barrage of sub-brands anymore. They can’t promote skin-lightening in India and self-esteem in England and expect to retain any credibility when it comes to their corporate brand.

There’s a campaign calling on Facebook to remove racist applications. Why not add your name to it today.