The hypersexualization of young girls in America has reached an all time high, which is highly disturbing and dangerous. Most of the problem originates from the media. Pageants fused with reality T.V, such as “Toddlers & Tiaras”, are broadcasted on national television for anyone to see. (Including but not limited to other aspiring beauty queens and child predators.) Girls aging anywhere from 1-16 years old strut around a stage, winking at judges, and flaunting false teeth, eyelashes, and spray-tans. One episode of the show is enough to divulge that young girls are acting more like young adults.
Skip Hollandsworth wrote an entire article about how hypersexualization occurs in pageants more often than people would like to believe. In the beginning …show more content…
Watching the show, for instance, you see girls gliding across the stage, winking and smiling. During the performance category, some girls wear revealing clothes and dance more like they’re in a club than competing for a crown. What’s worse is they’re being taught it’s okay. “Remember, honey, step, then turn, then give those judges a big wink, one mother says encouragingly… Your job is to make them love you.” (Hollandsworth 491). Those “encouraging” words will probably always be stuck in that little girl’s head and she’ll think of it every time she meets someone. That’s a lot of pressure for a 6-year old girl, and explains the link between pageants and the hypersexualization of young girls. All the girls are seeking approval, and they get it by winning a crown for they’re inappropriate appearances “... strutting across pageant stages, looking like a baby Marilyn Monroe with makeup more suited to women several times her age” Hollandsworth says, describing JonBenet Ramsey (a 6-year old pageant girl, who was brutally murdered in her own …show more content…
Giroux, author, professor and the Global TV network chair, believes that pageants revoke children of the “luxury of innocence”. In short, his article, “Child Beauty Pageants: A Scene From the "Other America"”, explains that allowing children to participate in pageants, is like handing your kids off to someone else so you don’t have to raise them. By doing this, children are exposed to sexuality way younger than they should be; their innocence is taken away.
“ The child beauty pageant is an exemplary site for examining critically how the discourse of innocence mystifies the appropriation of children's bodies in a society that increasingly sexualizes and commodifies them. Not only do child beauty pageants function as a pedagogical site where children learn about pleasure, desire and the roles they might assume in an adult society, they also rationalize and uphold commercial and ideological values within the larger society that play an important role in marketing children as objects of pleasure, desire and sexuality” (Henry A.
Skip Hollandsworth wrote an entire article about how hypersexualization occurs in pageants more often than people would like to believe. In the beginning …show more content…
Watching the show, for instance, you see girls gliding across the stage, winking and smiling. During the performance category, some girls wear revealing clothes and dance more like they’re in a club than competing for a crown. What’s worse is they’re being taught it’s okay. “Remember, honey, step, then turn, then give those judges a big wink, one mother says encouragingly… Your job is to make them love you.” (Hollandsworth 491). Those “encouraging” words will probably always be stuck in that little girl’s head and she’ll think of it every time she meets someone. That’s a lot of pressure for a 6-year old girl, and explains the link between pageants and the hypersexualization of young girls. All the girls are seeking approval, and they get it by winning a crown for they’re inappropriate appearances “... strutting across pageant stages, looking like a baby Marilyn Monroe with makeup more suited to women several times her age” Hollandsworth says, describing JonBenet Ramsey (a 6-year old pageant girl, who was brutally murdered in her own …show more content…
Giroux, author, professor and the Global TV network chair, believes that pageants revoke children of the “luxury of innocence”. In short, his article, “Child Beauty Pageants: A Scene From the "Other America"”, explains that allowing children to participate in pageants, is like handing your kids off to someone else so you don’t have to raise them. By doing this, children are exposed to sexuality way younger than they should be; their innocence is taken away.
“ The child beauty pageant is an exemplary site for examining critically how the discourse of innocence mystifies the appropriation of children's bodies in a society that increasingly sexualizes and commodifies them. Not only do child beauty pageants function as a pedagogical site where children learn about pleasure, desire and the roles they might assume in an adult society, they also rationalize and uphold commercial and ideological values within the larger society that play an important role in marketing children as objects of pleasure, desire and sexuality” (Henry A.