I saw an article in The Sun a few minutes ago that made my eyes nearly bug out of my head.
An excerpt:
With her face caked in make-up, hair perfectly coiffed and acrylic nails brightly painted, Madison Wren-Campbell is not your average nine-year-old.
and this:
The pageant trend comes as new research shows teenage girls are more concerned with being beautiful than being clever.
More than a quarter of those questioned in a recent survey of 3,000 said they would rather spend money on their looks than education.
And one in five of those polled for YoungPoll.com had thought about having plastic surgery.
Seriously???
This is horrifying. And I realize it’s my job to write about beauty every day and to encourage us playing around with it, but did not JonBenet teach us about the horror of going too far? And even further, even aside from the pageant world – the message that young girls are so ruined by the world around them that they are putting stuff like plastic surgery and beauty enhancements before education is just saddening.
And I think it speaks about the status of self-esteem among teenage girls as well. We are “less” if we aren’t the prettiest/thinnest girl around.
I was once a little girl who found myself absorbed in fashion magazines and emulating beautiful starlets way before my time. The result? I never felt pretty enough, and I comforted myself with food…I ended up severely overweight and then spent my teenage years hating myself for a body I was unhappy with. It’s only now – when I wasted so many years feeling sad – that I feel good about who I am, and it was THAT feeling that made me find my natural weight.
I am one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t a pageant girl, or a attention-starved impressionable adolescent. This, though, what these children are putting themselves through all in the name of being the prettiest…who made that OK???
Note, I am not against pageants, at all. Or even kids in pageants. But let them be kids. Who wants an eight year old who looks like a jaded 30-year-old? They have plenty of time for that later.
Image: Sxc.hu
