Little Miss Perfect: It's All About the Beauty

You want your little children to get involved in the world and it’s various activities, so you decide to enroll them in the gymnastics club or the local children’s soccer team; But what about putting them in a beauty pageant for little girls? Would you be okay with that? Some parents believe that making their children compete in these beauty pageants is the equivalent to putting your kids on a soccer team. It’s just for fun. Perhaps it is just for fun, but what about the message it’s giving off? Little Miss Perfect is a show, featured on WeTV, which follows these children and their mothers as they prepare for the pageant through to the announcement of the winner of the pageant. The following link shows a sneak peek of the show and gives you a better idea of exactly what these pageants are like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Gq6xV0jeg
Most of these children are so young; it’s hard to believe that they decided they wanted to do this for themselves. The mother who tells her daughter to stop saying “I’m sorry” because it makes her feel like her child is doing this for her mother and not for herself made me laugh, because the truth is the daughter probably is just doing this for her mother, and because the mother wants to stay in denial about the fact, she’s telling her daughter not to say she’s sorry. These children are forced to wear hair extensions, spray on tans, tons of make up, and in many cases, flippers, which are fake white teeth you wear over your real teeth to give the image of a perfect smile. In one of the episodes, the little girl had two loose teeth in the front, and the mother kept making her wear the flippers, even when it was obvious that it was not at all comfortable for the child with her loose teeth.
If you think about Stuart Hall’s cultural circuit, you can see how messages in popular culture play a role in these things. The media encodes the message that gives a large amount of emphasis on appearance and beauty. The way the viewers decode this message is important because it plays a part in their actions. These pageant moms decode the message encoded by the media in the dominant-hegemonic way. They pretty much take the message at face value, and thus beauty becomes their number one priority. As Janet Staiger wants to know, after receiving the message, what are they doing with it? In this case, they’re taking their children and making them compete in beauty pageants.
Personally, I absolutely do not agree with their actions. I think it’s wrong that these children are getting the message that beauty is so important and it’s something to be in competition for. These are little kids, and since they don’t have enough agency to do otherwise, they most probably will be taking these messages at face value. Not only is it wrong that this is the message they are receiving, but they’re also being shown that their own natural beauty is not enough. They need to have these false images to put up, using fake hair, fake tans, and fake teeth. These beauty pageants may be just for “fun” in the moment, as the mothers say, but for the long run, they give off nothing but negative messages.