Beauty Pageants

Real Price of Beauty Pageants

Television shows, such as Toddlers and Tiaras on TLC, have opened the eyes of everyone around the world to beauty pageants. Girls are forced to spend countless hours putting on wigs, hair extensions, fake teeth, and layers of makeup until they look like mature adults. Beauty pageants, in the United States today, are a five- billion- dollar industry and an estimated 250,000 girls participate in the beauty pageants every year. Parents are becoming obsessed with making their daughters beautiful, rich and famous. Girls should not be put into beauty pageants by their parents because they are affiliated with the objectification of women, the increased risk of developing emotional and cognitive issues and they take away girls' childhoods.

Beauty pageants objectify women because they teach girls their self worth is based upon their appearance rather than their inner beauty. The girls have to follow the judges ideals about what is considered beautiful. Pageants turn women into objects and are affiliated with the sexualization of girls.

All the makeup, hair and costumes turn these girls into sex objects. The parents of the contestants put layers and layers of makeup on their daughters' faces, take them to tanning beds to darken their skin and some parents go as far as to take their children for Botox treatments. Girls showing a mature, adult look create unwanted attention and help to lure in sex offenders and pedophiles. "Stacy Dittrich, a former detective in Ashland, OH who specialized in sex crimes and who is now a true crime author and media analyst, says, "I found, in the course of my work, pedophiles who had gone to great lengths to obtain videos of little girls walking around provocatively, pulling their shirts down off their shoulders and smiling at the camera." (Toddlers In Tiaras, Hollandsworth)

Beauty pageants screw up girls psychologically and are not healthy for girls. Studies have shown the negative effects of beauty...