I thought Australian women – mothers – had a lot more sense than to buy into the hideous spectacle that is the American child ‘beauty’ pageant. You know them; those baby meat-parades where tiny little girls – toddlers, babies – are dressed up like Las Vegas showgirls and trained to vamp it up on a stage in front of a panel of adult judges. These events have moved far beyond the purposes for which their deluded, crazed mothers claim they exist. Little girls as young as four and as ‘mature’ as eight, are spray-tanned, botoxed, their teeth are bleached and capped, their hair is glued with extensions, they cannot eat until after they have ‘performed’ so their little bellies do not ‘stick out’ on stage. This is not about beauty, this not about fun – this is about child exploitation at it’s finest and it has been happening in America for years. Now they are trying to introduce it to Australians and the quest has been a rocky one indeed.
Six year old pageant veteran, Eden Wood, was taken to Australia by her mother Mickie to launch the ridiculously named Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant and the entire venture has fortunately failed. Little Eden, an idol for pageant mothers, was to have met her ‘fans’ after mothers paid $50 for their little girls to have a photo op with her. The child became the centre of a publicity tug of war between television current affairs shows, earned an easy $70,000 for her mother Mickie in the process, and then was swiftly spirited out of the country leaving scores of very disappointed mothers and children. Serves them right, for buying into this horrible phenomenon. The natural god-given beauty of childhood should never be put up for judging.
These pageants are not cheap to enter; the mothers spend hundreds to enter their children into a pageant and untold thousands buying the paraphernalia and transporting their children from town to town following the pageant trail. I see nothing beautiful about three year old girls strutting up and down a stage in make-up, high heels and a bikini to be judged by a panel of adult men and women, in fact it is hideous, and why any right-minded mother would allow her child to be paraded in such a way is beyond me. These money-making concerns serve only the pockets of the organisers and deluded dreams of the mothers. That is the most hideous thing of all.






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