A beauty pageant is a competition of beauty, judging females as young as eight months old based on solely their outer beauty. By beginning these unnatural trends at such a young age, these girls will inevitably gain a distorted body image by growing up with a biased definition of "beautiful."
Beauty pageants are wrong because of many reason, the main reason being the values that they teach young females. Beauty pageants not only objectify women by basing self-worth on physical appearances, but by judging a competition of beauty, these pageants are teaching young girls that success is based on "beauty" of physical attributes.
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| Toddlers In Tiaras Source |
Self-esteem deprivation is beginning at that age, and it's so accepted that there's a hit reality TV show about it?
Self-esteem is also an enormous negative factor of beauty pageants. Think about it: a young girl has just lost a competition based on her beauty. How would that make you feel?
According to a recent University of Minnesota, Minneapolis study, "a significant association between childhood beauty pageant participation and increased body dissatisfaction, difficulty trusting interpersonal relationships and greater impulsive behavior indicate a trend toward increased feelings of ineffectiveness," (Wondelich, Ackard and Henderson).
Facts don't lie, the obvious truth is that these competitions of outer beauty can -- and most often do -- cause mental instabilities in its participants. In fact, studies show that more than eighty percent of ten year old girls are afraid of being fat.
"Being a little Barbie doll say that your body has to be a certain way and your hair has to be a certain way. In girls particularly, this can unleash a whole complex of destructive self-experiences that can lead to eating disorders and all kinds of body distortions in terms of body image," say psychologist William Pinsof. In other words, these young females dress up with loads of makeup and hours behind their hair, looking like Barbie dolls, which, in terms, can lead to numerous body image distortions throughout those girls' lives.
Another disturbing factor concerning beauty pageant is that the rules are basically nonexistent. According to Attorney General of the Department of Justice in California, "there is no law that prescribes how a pageant must be managed, the rules are set by each contest promoter." These contests are not only a judgement of beauty, but they are run with no law-binding rules! So, anyone has the ability to publicly judge a girl as young as eight months old simply because they are promoting the event?
Additionally, the people making decisions for the children are, most of the time, not even their doing: it's their parents.
Despite the detrimental effects on young females, beauty pageants are still one of the fastest growing industries in the United States. So, why is it so widely accepted? What's next?
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