>Barbie Girls
>At last. The long awaited (by me, anyway) baby pageant column is online at the Nashville Scene.
I’ll write more on this subject tomorrow. I didn’t have room in the column for all the sordid tales from the event, and much of it wasn’t so much funny as it was sickening.
You should know, too, that I’m not opposed to all pageants. I think state fair and local pageants can be cute and kitschy. There’s also a “natural” pageant circuit, in which obvious makeup is not allowed and judging is based on stage presence and personality rather than hair, teeth, and costumes. Honestly, I don’t even have a problem with Miss America-style pageants, because the women who participate in them are adults who’ve made a conscious decision to present themselves in that way and that is and should be their prerogative.
The pageants I have a problem with are the child “glitz” pageants, as they’re called in the industry, and that’s the kind of pageant I wrote about in this week’s column. Read the full text below.
Barbie Girls
So you’re watching a bunch of heavily made-up girls wearing blonde wigs, painted-on tans and bikinis wriggle their butts on a stage to the beat of suggestive dance music. Maybe you’re at an upscale strip club. Or better yet, you scored an invitation to party at the Playboy Mansion.
Or maybe you’re sitting in a conference room audience at the Opryland Hotel while a bunch of toddlers strut their mini-stuff for a panel of pageant judges.
That’s how I spent my Saturday. After receiving a postcard about the Dixieland Dolls and Darlings National Pageant, I knew fate was telling me to check out the baby beauty queen scene for myself. I didn’t think it could possibly be as bad as the media would have us believe. As it turned out, I was right.
It was worse.
The preschoolers I watched parade across the stage in custom-made, thousand-dollar costumes were among the cream of the pageant circuit crop, traveling from as far away as California and Texas with entourages of hairdressers, makeup artists, coaches, airbrush tanners and manicurists. After hours of painting and primping and teasing and gluing, even the three-year-olds looked sexier than I did on my own wedding night.
We weren’t there long before a baby in a sequined top and a diaper shyly toddled over to my two-year-old daughter, whom I’d brought along to watch the show. She wore a mop of synthetic curls pinned to her head and enough make-up to satisfy even the most pockmarked Vegas showgirl. Baby and I stared at her, fascinated.
“Kennadee Belle! We’re on stage in two minutes!” A tuxedo-clad man with spiked blonde hair and orange skin rushed over and scooped her up, jerking her into a pair of satin hot pants and eying Baby with distaste.
Once on stage, Kennadee Belle turned her back on the judges, bent over double, and lifted her butt up and down to the music while Tuxedo Man beamed with pride. After a few thrown kisses and spacey-eyed smiles, her job was done. She was carried off the stage, into the waiting arms of another bleached and tanned man wearing an ought-to-be-illegal-sized, diamond-studded belt.
“Fabulous! Fabulous!” He shouted, grinning triumphantly at the moms around him.
As the girls got older, their wigs and lashes got longer, their tans deeper and their teeth whiter. It wasn’t long before I started having trouble remembering they were only a few years old, and instead found myself naming them in my head. Future Muscle Car Model. Future Howard Stern Guest. Future Plastic Surgery Addict.
After an hour of fluff, feathers, and more Dynasty flashbacks than I thought I’d ever have in my lifetime, the senior six-year-olds finally pranced onstage with all the jaded world-weariness of veteran Rockettes on the last night of their Christmas run. Their practiced smirks and simpers were so irritating that for the first time, I began thinking that maybe corporal punishment wasn’t such a bad idea. When they finished, one burst into tears as she jumped down from the stage into the arms of her coach.
“I couldn’t find my flippers before it was time to go on!” she wailed.
A mom seated beside me overheard the girl and turned to her own child.
“How’re your flippers doin’?” she asked worriedly.
“Good,” the girl replied, flashing her a dazzling smile. “I’m gonna give ‘em to you so I don’t lose ‘em, okay?” Carefully, she popped out a set of fake teeth, custom designed to cover her own still-growing baby teeth.
“You never know what’s gonna come off these girls, do ya?” Her grandmother laughed, looking at me. Seriously, what was left? Silicone falsies? A glass eye?
I had no time to contemplate the matter further. The second round was starting. This time, the contestants had chosen their own music and all I can say is that I now know what must be playing continuously over the Guantanamo Bay PA system: Barbie Girl.
The song is hands-down the most annoying thing recorded since Who Let the Dogs Out. Perhaps for that very reason, almost half the girls had chosen it for their stage routine. With lyrics like You can do my hair, undress me everywhere, and I’m a blond bimbo girl in a fantasy world blasting my eardrums while two and three-year-old mini-harlots undulated before me, I began to wonder if someone had slipped a roofie into my Goldfish. I looked around nervously, half-expecting John Mark Karr to be carried in on a litter by a harem of kindergarteners.
Six Barbie Girl choruses later, my stomach declared mutiny. I grabbed Baby’s hand and we hightailed it out of there.
“Did you have fun today?” I asked her as I strapped her in for the ride home.
“Yeah,” she replied.
“Hey, you don’t want to be in a pageant like those crazy babies, do you?”
“No!” She shouted. “I wanna crush bad guys! An’… big spiders!”
Thank God.
>My first time to your blog..and I love it! Love the article too! Those pagents scare me quite a bit. It’s so unnatural, like the kids are dolls for their parents to dress up and play with.
>You were spot-on as usual, Lindsay. How appropriate that the ad right beside the end of your column was this:SEXTOY.comHuge selection of adult products and videos. On demand video – no membership required. Money making opportunities in the adult industry also available.Um, yeah. Those pagents ought to be illegal – God knows what all that crap is doing to those kids. Parents also should know better. Can you tell I hate those things? Poor kids.
>Oh. My. God! I had no idea the baby pageants were like that. False teeth on those poor little girls?? What happens if, when they grow into teenaged and adult hood, they aren’t ‘perfectly beautiful’? I wonder how their lives change?
>AWESOME column. I love how you portrayed the horror of child beauty pageants with humor and avoided coming off as preachy, but the message was still loud and clear. Loved it! Oh, and I’m glad Baby wanted nothing to do with it. Phew!
>Love the post, love the article. I can’t belive what some Mom’s put their kids through just to get kudos for themselves. Ca-razy!
>Eewwww. That’s all I can say. And you lasted *far* longer than I would have.
>I’m still not sure why these pageants don’t classify as exploitation of youth? It’s damaging, not healthy, and honestly, how is it not exploitation?And I’m with you, not talking about the cute kitchy ones, talking about the glitzy ones.
>Scary.But Baby seems to have handled it well. Just as long as she doesn’t dress up the spiders before she crushes them….
>I imagine pageants like that are a pedophile’s dream. Those poor kids. I mean- fake teeth?! Come on people! What kind of self image are these girls going to have?
>My eldest was in a couple of modeling pagents. She had fun with it, loved softball more. Had to give up the pagents for the softball games. I was just ssooo devestated! Not!
>Fake teeth? Called “flippers”?Ack.
>Little Miss Sunshine is hilarious. Not a baby pageant, but a little girl (think: Jon Benet) pageant.
>That does sound so creepy. And Barbie Girl would have to be the most innappropriate song ever. Except for anything Madonna sings.
>Training kids for the dog-and-pony show. Someone should call CPS. Hopefully the parents are splitting the prize pot between the “Education Fund” and the “Therapy Fund”. Those kids are going to need it.
>Good glory. Those pageants completely creep me out.
>Oh yeah, Vogue was one of the dance songs, too, which seemed appropriate. Cotton Eyed Joe was the runner up for most played. There was a lot of western wear in evidence. It was frightening.
>God, honey. God. And I though some of the stage moms I ran into when I did theatre as a kid were bad. Shouldn’t these people get arrested for pedophilia? Or at the very least be investigated by Child Protective Services?
>OMG! I had no idea. Why? Why? Do people put their kids in these…
>Great. As if I don’t have enough to do, I’m going to have to start training my son how to spot a pageant princesses so he can duly avoid them. Along with the materialistic girls, the cookoo girls, the stupid girls and the not-good-enough-for-you girls.What were we talking about again?
>I don’t know, I can laugh about most things, but I agree with you, there’s nothing funny about these pageants. Putting aside the fact that they fuel paedophile fantasies, what are they teaching these poor contestants? That they have to be primped within an inch of their lives and then do some robotic routine to gain their mom’s approval? I’d be interested to know if there’s ever been a study on how kid beauty queens turn out when they grow up. I’d hazard a guess at some major psychological disorders. You should thank God that your daughter is more interested in spiders than in synthetic wigs.
>the thing that really turns my stomach with these pageants (and the more excessive dance schools are no better) is the parents’ insistence that they only let little Kennedee Belle perform because “she loves it so much”. Well yeah, even assuming that’s true(!), I bet she loves ice cream “so much” too, and does she get to eat that for 35 hours of training and 12 hours of performance every week? There are some sad sorry puppies passing for parents out there… Good on you for having a crack at them!
>ps – I actually think the choice of Barbie Girl is hilarious – the song is so obviously a deliberate spoof of exactly the values these parents hold dear !!
>I can’t bring myself to admit hating these contests and the people who hinge their lives (and life savings) on their importance. I can’t because it is my belief that these folks are too busy with the pomp and circumstance of all this debauchery to register to vote. I assume if they had Bush Jr. would have won by a wider margin. I also feel kind of sorry for them.
>One of my best friends was in pageants and she loved it. That said, she CHOSE to be involved. My husband’s cousin is also big into pageants, having won Miss Hometown one year. The thing is they LIKED it, and their parents supported them. That’s not to say I approve of the trashiness inherent in the pageants like the one you described. I think if I were to have a daughter and she wanted to be in pageants, I would try to steer her to the Natural one you mentioned. The rest is just too creepy for me. Reality is so much more interesting to me, and these pageants are just adding layer upon layer of fake to hide the real people behind them, who are some sad individuals.P.S. to those pageant parents: There are dolls on the market with perfect teeth, eyes, and hair, spackled makeup and a fake smile. There’s also a reason a lot of people consider those the most creepy ones on the market. They remind me of clowns, which scare the shit out of me. Ugh.
>Oh. My. Goodness.I think these cutesy little girl pageants are scary, and I feel bad for the little girls. I remember some show I saw the little girls were so miserable! And the parents were pushing them and pushing them, it’s totally different if the little girl DOES like it.So glad your little baby wants to crush spiders instead!
>I can’t disagree with anything you said about child glitz pageants, but I do have to comment on the “cute and kitschy” fair pageants.I was once in a pageant where I had to plow 5 rows with a single harrow plow.Now that? That is a talent!
>Great essay, Lindsay. Many of the comments here have already summed up my feelings on the subject. I have a half-sister that used to do every pageant she could (she grew up down South). My reaction was always a somewhat baffled, “Huh.” PS: have you seen Little Miss Sunshine?
>okay, not only am I totally creeped out and really quite scared by the whole child pageant thing, but this clinches it – there was an ad on that page for sex toys. Ewwww.
>Those kiddie pageants are wrong on so many levels.Great essay Lindsay.
>Okay, I’ve been a lurker for a little while now and I LOVE your writing! I have to comment here… that article was the best! My oldest daughter, when she was 5, had to draw a picture of what she wanted to be when she grew up for her kindergarten teacher. She drew a photo of a girl in camoflauge holding a gun in each hand and bullets flying ou (she labeled it “Marine”). 🙂 My youngest daughter (now 5), however, wants to be a ‘real’ princess, but there is no way I would put her in one of those pageants. We got something in the mail for one a few weeks ago and first of all – the COST of entering was absolutely outrageous!!! Let alone the effects of being around all of those perfection obsessed girls that are going to end up in a mental institution the moment they get a stretch mark or a wrinkle!!
>Holy crap, Lindsay. I’ve seen pictures of girls like JonBennet, and that creepy photo site (that must have been used by all but 2 of the little girls on the link you posted). The only time I’ve “seen” kiddy pagents was on Showbiz Moms & Dads. But that was a slightly older child. Not a TWO YEAR OLD. What’s more messed up than making babies do pagents, is the fact that it seems like their parents are forcing them into this to relive their “glory days” of being Miss Corn Crop 1968 or something. A two year old can NOT decide they want to do this sort of thing, much less perform on demand. Kiddie glitz pagents are just sick, and I’m glad you wrote about them twice. Meg
>It’s a fantastic article, L. Congrats. I don’t know what’s scarier – little girls all made up like that, or the name Kennedeee Belle.
>Loved the article! I had no idea they went to the extent of wearing fake teeth. I am really appalled at the whole thing.
>nauseating! terrifying! on so manylevels. well said.
>Sickening and sad.Great write-up!
>First I want to say there are “natural” pageants that are great for girls. Its more like playing dress up- all the girls get awards and trophies- and they have elaborate pizza parties where the girls get to have real fun and dance and meet really great friends. There are rules against wearing make-up, fake hair, fake teeth, ect. The atmosphere is really that of a huge slumber party where tons of girls from all over meet up at a hotel, have an age appropriate pizza party, spend the night, and then get to play dress up the next day with all their new friends. The girls really love it. Now with that said. I’ve seen some really disgusting stuff associated with the “glitz” pageants. Fake hair, teeth, tans, painted on make-up- and that’s not even the half of it. At age 5 they are conscious of “I better not have that pizza- it will make me fat!” What?! Are you kidding me? Seeing pictures of those dolled up girls makes me think of one thing- Prostitutes. It makes me think of all those tiny girls being forced into prostitution in other countries. I’d rather be shot dead than apply one ounce of make-up on my beautiful little girls face.
>Hi, just wanted to comment, as a mother who was also at that pageant, i will be putting my daughter in it next year. I do agree with you some parents are very strict and overly fake with their daughters there. however i know that i will not be using flippers and not all mothers do, several of the mothers i am friends with run the glitz pageants and they treat it just like naturals, if you enjoy it, thats all that matters,,, i suggest trying to have a positive look going in instead of knowing you arent gonna like it before you even get there. just so you know. this will be my daughters first glitz, we normally do natural, i think it is all about teaching your child they are beautiful without the makeup, it is only for the stage after all.
>I think you are making a horrible mistake. Why not stick with natural? Why perpetuate the horror that is glitz?
>The government should make beauty pageants for anyone under the age of 16 illegal. This is consistent with the working age. Shame on those parents who subject their young children to this kind of perverse humiliation!
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