Alison, age 10.
Ashley, age 8.
I stumbled across a link to these photos by Los Angeles photographer Susan Anderson on an art website. Her series is titled High Glitz. As art patrons, I think we are supposed to view the work ironically, but I am unable to do so, finding it frightening and disturbing. These are little beauty pageant girls, of course, and we are familiar with the genre. Seeing them up close in detail like this is far creepier than the video footage I have seen. The children are objectified, sexualized, and fetishized. They are turned into some kind of exaggerated joke, like over-the-top drag queens. But it’s not funny is it? Follow the link and see for yourself.
It seems to me that more and more the boundary is blurred between girlhood and womanhood. Little girls are sexy, the media tells us in pictures: pouting centerfold models with lollipops in their mouths are seductively posed with white teddy bears. And how about other end of the spectrum — older women employing everything including injectibles and surgery to look younger and thus more alluring. If young equals sexy, how low do we go? Look at the world of fashion. Most runway models are between 14 and 19 years old, and some are as young as 12. What does that say about us, about what we have learned to want? (I’m asking about both men and women.)
Of course there is a powerful commercial motivation to these activities. So perhaps we are looking at a slippery slope, with Bratz dolls at the top and criminal underworld of child sex trafficking down at the bottom. (According to the United Nations, it is the fastest-growing area of organized crime). It’s striking to me that the role of child prostitute provided the original momentum for the careers of several female movie stars: 12-year-old Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, 14-year-old Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, and 13-year-old Penelope Cruz in a French soap opera, Série Rose.
Most women I know react immediately with rage and revulsion to these photos of children dressed and groomed to look like sexy women. But if you can get past those feelings for a moment, what comes after the anger, when you calm down and think about it?
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, as I try to sort out mine.
Tags: child beauty pageant, exploitation, glamour, sexuality
I had an art history professor in college who frequently referred to slim runway models as “decorated phalluses” and insisted that most of the fashion world was not for or about real women at all. It’s an extreme statement but one that holds a lot of truth. There’s a huge abyss between the world of runway fashion and just about every woman I know.
This is another situation that feels like behavior from another world, not my home planet. I have deep revulsion regarding this whole subculture, and finding any point of commonality feels impossible. So I may not be capable of speaking objectively. Nothing about it makes sense to me.
We have a pederastic culture. When a therapist friend of mine was asked by the government to work with internet porn predators, he said it was so unnerving to see how ordinary these men (and yes, they were all male) were. “In a crowd, you would never be able to pick them out.” That has haunted me because I think it is a serious disease that is masked and mostly underground. Those few “sanctioned” activities that feed to that proclivity–such as these beauty pageants–are just the tip of the iceberg.
What to do? It would be very difficult to outlaw the practice. But maybe I’m just being cynical. Our culture is much more conscious about protecting animals from abuse, maybe we will become more conscious advocates of children and childhood. I guess I can hope.
PS Great post. Thank you for raising the issue.
Well, I’ll tell you one thing, it depends on where you are from. If you are from the south, it is so common to see little girls dressed this way, it is much less disturbing. This type of outfit in the south most of the time indicated just the opposite of available, these girls are LADIES with all the trimmings. They represent conservative values including not the least of which, abstinence until marriage. Where I went to high school, in middle Tennessee, the little girls and the bigger high school girls who looked like this had all the power and popularity. They had their daddies wrapped around their fingers and were showered with attention and presents. And their mommas were very proud of them and the little girls loved to dress up. In their culture these girls are not seen as sexual objects, far from it, but as objects of beauty and (can you believe it) respect. They are queens of the royal not drag variety.
I think it is very important to consider the culture before you jump to a judgment. Little girls in warmer climates in rural Africa often go without shirts so their vibrant paint can be admired by all. Ornamentation of this type is just decoration which we overlay our own opinions about what is proper and what is not.
Would I have entered my daughter in this kind of contest? No way. I’m from a different culture. And I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Wow. Not sure exactly how to react. I’ve been making a film project about photo retouching, but this is on another level. It’s interesting to see such over the top images of girls — makes me think about the over the top images of women that we see everyday. Seems more outrageous when the girls are so young, but it is a similar process.
Thanks for posting this.
Jesse
http://www.JesseDocs.com
Like all child abuse, it is a misuse of the natural power that adults have over children.
I believe that adults in these abnormal situations must have some difficulties relating to other adults in the given area of encounter with the child. Those difficulties probably center on power issues and in my view involve distorting what are normally horizontal relations (with equals, i.e. adults) into a vertical arrangement, for which children are a natural fit for the inferior, powerless role.
The other thing that jumps out at me in these cases is the lack of appropriate empathy for the unnatural role of the child and what the child is experiencing. It makes me wonder how the adult perpetrators came to such an un-empathic stance, although concern for the offender is secondary to concern for the child victim.
Re: Cheri Armana’s comments. While her observations of Southern mores are no doubt correct, they don’t address the world of child beauty pageants, which is, according to what I have read, a highly artificial, that is to say unnatural, and high pressure world. The manner in which Southern belles dress and comport themselves does not seem to me to be comparable to the sexually charged and stylized dress and mannerisms of the child beauty queens when they are “performing”.
I’m from the South, from Tennessee. And I think this thing is disgusting and should be outlawed. It makes me want to throw up.
I think it’s child abuse and kiddie porn all rolled into one.