(Child) Pageants Opposing Viewpoints - Shelby Stephens

For my blog post describing the views of sources in opposition to mine, I decided to use Darling Divas or Damaged Daughters? The Dark Side of Child Beauty Pageants and an Administrative Law Solution by Lucy Wolfe. In this article, Wolfe attempts to describe several of the issues and controversies surrounding child pageants and particularly the child pageant contestants and their families as depicted on The Learning Channel’s (TLC) popular show “Toddlers & Tiaras”. Wolfe and many other critics like her consider child pageants to overly sexualize these young girls (and boys), give them gender stereotypes, expose them to discrimination, and sexual and domestic violence, which should be punishable by law. The article also says the most obvious price pageant contestants have to pay is the pain associated with “intense” beauty regimens. The article claims that child pageants lead to three significant types of harm, physical, emotional, and societal. Many parents have also become the object of criticism from these pageants by being regarded as abusive parents and being said to live vicariously through their children. In my opinion, Wolfe discredits herself by blowing many “inappropriate” aspects of child pageants far out of proportion. To begin her article, Wolfe describes, in her words, the performance of a child named Mia featured in one of the show’s episodes. She does this by not telling who the performer is and not giving context. She then likens the performance to that of a “sexy dancing diva”, a “Las Vegas showgirl” and an “exotic dancer at a nightclub”. After reading this harsh description of a little girl’s performance, I decided to YouTube search it. What Wolfe refers to as “gyrating” on the stage is simply a little girl playing dress up (yes, as Madonna, complete with her famous cone-bra outfit) on stage and bouncing around, shaking her hips. While the dance and outfit is done to be funny and not in any way overly sexual, Wolfe quotes this girl and others like her as being "being trained to act like hookers, pole dancers and/or strippers." This source and countless others like it state that these young girls are being used as overly sexual erotic child pornography. However, the reality of the vast majority of the cases is that these costumes do not expose the little girls, their routines do not include dancing like hookers or pole dancers, and do not in any way portray them as pornographic. The actual people associating these children with hookers and pornography are themselves. By attacking the children, they are in fact the ones associating them with being overly sexual and giving them this stigma.