Kiddie Pageants = Kiddie Porn (dialup warning)

The subject line expresses my opinion -- always has.

So, I'm searching Google Images for a Mississippi state seal to use in a photo mockup, and I see a thumbnail of the pic below. It's so disturbing even at thumbnail size, I investigate further. As far as I can tell, the site -- http://www.kassieandkira.com/ -- appears to be some sort of pushy-pageant-mother's "brag page" for her two little stars (as well as a place to sell off the kids' old pageant outfits).

The image below is used as a banner on kiddie-pageant message forums (750x550 and nearly 300k, btw)... Is this one of the most revolting, exploitive things you've ever seen? Are you thinking, "JonBenet Ramsey"? Are you thinking, "Isn't there some sort of law to protect kids from this kind of shit?!"

This is disgusting:



Parents who do this to their children make me want to throw up. I wish children exploited like this for their parents' sick aspirations (and possibly sicker fantasies) would be automatically removed from their homes for their own protection.

BTW, did you do a right-click, Properties on the image? Do it, and notice the name of the image itself: "kkklogobanner.jpg" (!!!)

Goddamn, rednecks are idiots/assholes/or both

before being practical.

I mean a cute pretty little girl is one thing, but a lot of the glamor stuff has always been about sexiness, not prettiness. I'm talking about red nail polish, lipstick, etc. The way high heel shoes move a woman's leg look. Its just not something that should be associated with kids, its a sesx appeal thing.

Cute kid contests are one thing, (but still a little creepy sometimes)...putting makeup and lipstick and huge hair and high heels and pantyhose on little girls is not okay in my book. My mom wouldn't even let me wear black nylons as part of a band uniform when I was in the 7th grade- she said that was something for adults, and I could wear the regular kind. (Of course, nylons are heinous anyway).

If I ever have a daughter I won't let her do that stuff until she is in high school. I've always felt uncomfortable with young girls doing those pagents. They should be out playing with their friends and dolls and stuff like that. I didn't get a makeup kit (that was fake) until I was in mid elementary school.

It has sickened me since before Jon Benet Ramsey. The sexualiziation of little girls. By their parents.

but I've read that kind of stuff is big in the deep south, showcasing little kids. It's not restricted to girls either. They have little boys pumping iron and doing jr muscleman contests. I'm glad they don't do it around here.

I doubt the parents are pimping out their daughters, but it is disturbing and I don't understand it.

And apparently some parents do not realize that these pageants are favorite hunting grounds for child molesters. If I had a child I'd want them to be a child. I keep thinking of those pictures of Jon Benet all primped up with makeup and posing flirtatiously. Why do parents think this is a good thing?

yuck

JonBenet Ramsey is the first ting that popped into my head when I saw this.

Kids need to be kids. They are entitled to their childhood first. They don't need to be mocked up little women to fill the fantasy of a mother so desperate for attention she tries to seek it through her children.

I agree with you on this. It is child porn. After all, one doesn't need to see naked pictures to have an imagination.

Question, is this kinda thing more common in the south?

And the right click on the image itself is rather disturbing.

Here in Oz we have little baby pageants, but they are nothing like this. The babies are still babies.

not "kiddie porn", IMO.

And it has got to be keeping some psychiatrists working when these girls get to be in their late teens and too old for this stuff. --I do love the pict of the little girl holding up the sheaf of $20 dollar notes though---almost like a little angelic prostitute.

and that certainly includes men's body building. On the other hand some girls probably love this shit (and no doubt there would be some boys too, though I doubt that would be tolerated by the folks who do this stuff)

Other than the general unease it makes me feel about imposing strict stereotypical gender behaviors and the competitiveness and focus on appearance, it really is likely to be nothing worse than little league or the like - some parents are obviously nut jobs with kids sports too, but the majority are just doing some kind of "healthy" "hobby" with the family.

in my opinion is totally substantiated by the forced sexualization (exactly like crop-forcing, which is why I can't think of a better term) evident in the little-girl-as-whore costumes this sort of "pageantry" demands. Again, think of Jon Benet Ramsey and her lost childhood, taken from her by precisely this sort of forced sexualization (and the commercial exploitation associated therewith) long before she was slain.

To my knowledge, this particular perversion occurs only under capitalism -- American capitalism at that (can you imagine such exploitation of children in Cuba?) -- and it is a classic example of the interaction of Big Business and human greed.

Alas, I have no suggestion as to how it might be stopped. The fact that it is becoming less prevalent with the passage of time (or at least was, before the Bush Administration again uncaged capitalism's inner tyrannosaur), gives me the hope it may eventually be discredited to the point it is eliminated.

Meanwhile -- and this is its real horror -- such "pageantry" continues to core the very psyches out of the children who are so enslaved, leaving them to enter adulthood as drained and broken creatures utterly bereft of selfhood.

I knew of just such a woman years ago, and not even the best efforts of her most well-intentioned friends could fill the void: she went home from a party one summer night, smiling her best beauty-contest smile but in secret despair, and she gulped down a couple of bottles of prescription feel-goods with a whole fifth of vodka as chaser. Her friends found her a few days later, dead and already decomposing, the scene made all the more macabre by the fact she was wearing a pageantry crown she had won as a little girl.

Someone should make it a book or a movie.




Cher

I doubt that is the norm, however. Kids - humans are pretty resilient most of the time. I suspect even the ones who don't particularly enjoy the activity eventually come out pretty much "normal".

Kiddie Pageants are ridiculous and disgusting. I've no doubt in my mind they attract a pedo element.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone so skilled at making 5 year old little girls look like 20 year old prostitutes.

Disgusting.

... and I looked up photo retouching services.

I found this photo and was beyond disturbed...



This is what the digital 'artist' change on the photo:

Expression Change
**From Sad to Serious

This Photo Enhancement Includes:

**Brows tilted and shaped
**Frown lines around mouth and forehead removed
**Redness in eyes cleared away
**Corners of mouth turned upward
*Stray hairs removed
*Dark circles removed
*Lipstick line corrected
*Lashes added
*Skin blended
*Blush added
*Photo zoomed & cropped
*Photo brightened & sharpened

This child obviously had been crying and looked terrified in the original photo.

After seeing this and a few other photos, I'm convinced that if these pageants aren't a form of abuse then they sit right on the line.

Here's a link to the site: http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retouch1aaaaa.html

The "retouched" photos in the rest of the site are poorly done - any judge with even a fraction of a functioning brain will realize that the pics have been photoshopped into non-reality.

The After-pics look as fake as they are. I can't believe anyone would give this person $40 a pic. I can do better with iPhoto....

playing dress-up on adult terms is another.

rememebr rules for sex and relationships and play?

safe
sane
consentual

*not exactly safe, because one is deliberately introducing a child to adult territory in adult terms.
*not sane, because why couldn't one just let a child play on their terms? why must adult rules get involved? and why must complex sexual relationships, full of loaded cues, be foisted on a child's world?
*definitely not consentual. these kids are regularly barely out of age 7! that's hardly out into the age of self-awareness let alone age of consent!

disturbing as all get out to me.

If all we're trying to do is fight pedophilia, all we need to do is completely ban photographing children under 18. Because you just KNOW there's some pedophile out there who gets his rocks off with school pictures.

I'm also of two minds on the "child abuse" thing. If you've got a daughter who wants to play baseball and crawl in the mud and you force her to endure dance lessons, singing lessons, two-hour makeup sessions and all the other shit that goes along with pageants, that's definitely child abuse. But ya know what? Some little girls actually like all of that--the whole "I'm a princess" thing.

Here's the problem I have with it all. My wife was watching one of these kiddie-pageant shows on cable and I sat down in utter disbelief. In the pageant community there are four or five girls that, when one of them enters a pageant, you know your own kid is going to come in no higher than second. They were focusing on one of them. The parents homeschooled because a regular school wouldn't fit in with pageant preps. They went to a pageant every other weekend. They analyzed game film of pageants--and the child was picking out these infinitesimal errors in various dance routines, runway walks and so on. This shit was serious business. They were spending between $30,000 and $35,000 a year to play the pageant game when you count training, clothing, travel, entrance fees, professional stylists, photography and everything else you need. The father worked two jobs and the mother had some sort of pageant-advisory racket going. And they lived in an old doublewide they probably paid $25,000 for--they had a late-model minivan, which with all the driving they needed to do for pageants was a necessity. All this to pay the bills and to win college scholarships for the child so she wouldn't have to take out student loans. (The woman was going through the scholarships the child had won already--the ROI wasn't there.) Better, they'd been doing this for at least five years. And they had two other children who weren't in the pageant game. Okay, so they're sitting on at least a $155,000 investment so far (if it was $30k for the first four years and $35 this year) attempting to get together enough scholarships to send her to the first four years of college. And the child probably had another six good years of pageantry ahead of her...and this shit gets more expensive so let's say $40,000 per year and a total investment of over $355,000. Three hundred fifty-five thousand dollars for people who live in a doublewide and wear Wal-Mart fashion.

Also look at the effect this has on the other children's lives. There is a very high probability that little Tyffani's siblings are really fucking pissed that they can't get hot lunch at school and they have to wear thrift-store clothes because Tyffani needs another $600 pageant gown and the $800 portfolio Tyffani got six months ago is out of date and needs redone. If you want to solve the JonBenet killings, start questioning her siblings.

Let's reorder this woman's life. If you're looking to send your child to college, you can either (1) spend three hundred grand entering her in every Little Miss East Bumfuck pageant on the eastern seaboard while you otherwise live in semi-poverty in hopes of getting a $1000 scholarship here and a $1500 scholarship there...or (2) save half the money and use the other half to buy a home that doesn't still have the axles on it.

But it falls just short of pornography. It's like the whackos found another loophole for doing something that's rationalized as legal and "moral" - but obviously sick and wrong.

Falls short of abuse, too. Parents are setting impossibly high standards for their kids. I don't know why anybody would want to raise a pageant-bot. It can't possibly be fun for the kids (well, maybe a county fair once a year would be a kick), but some of the other things red-staters consider fun puzzle me as well.

These parents are seriously, totally fucked up.