Beauty Pageants: Stripping Away Our Girls' Healthy Sexuality?

Unfortunately, there's more to write about when it comes to the exploitation of little girls. In the commenting section of my previous post on Vogue Paris' photo shoot featuring little girls as sex objects, someone brought up child beauty pageants. I call them perverse circuses, and they can be severely detrimental to girls' well-being, especially as they go woefully under-regulated in this country.

Take Mia, for instance. Mia was featured in the TLC program "Toddlers and Tiaras." At two years old, Mia can be found onstage in a tight-fitting gold bustier with cones where her (non-existent) breasts would be, a la Madonna during her "Like A Virgin" tour. But this is only after she rips off her white robe outfitted with angel wings. Get it? From sweet, little angel to sex-pot? Oh, wait. She's TWO.

Her faux strip routine is cut a bit short when, after she removes the robe to reveal the gold-breasted costume, she forgets what else is supposed to happen. You can't blame the two-year-old girl. After all, she hasn't yet learned how to bump and grind, or pretend to hump the stage the way Madonna did during her on-stage performances. The audience is whooping and screaming as if they're at an actual Madonna concert and everyone seems immune to the fact that this girl is engaging in an approximation of an overtly sexual performance by a grown woman known for her overtly sexual public persona. You can hear Mia's mother in the crowd screaming to her toddler, "Yeah, Mia! Work it!" Work what, exactly?

It's great for Madonna -- it's entirely offensive for toddlers. It's offensive for young girls, period.

Healthy sexuality is not only about feeling positive about your own sexual self; it's about understanding boundaries and age-appropriate sexual activity. Girls can't learn that they have the right to say no to sexual advances; or that they have the right to be valued as full human beings with intelligence, compassion, and creativity; or that they have the right to explore and share their own sexuality as they see fit, if these little girl circuses continue.

Despite being one of the fastest growing industries in the country, the pageant industry is entirely unregulated. Child beauty pageants are exempt from any federal child labor laws in the way that children working in the film and television industry, for example, must be tightly regulated. Since different rules are set by individual pageant promoters, it's difficult to set state law regulating beauty pageants for children. Rep. Annie Mobley, of North Carolina, tried to pass a law in 2009 to set up a committee to study the effects of the pageant industry on children under thirteen. It didn't pass.

There should be some basic oversight of the pageant industry. When young girls are falling victim to eating disorders, depression, and anxiety due to popular culture's overwhelming imagery of girls as solely sexual beings to be valued for their looks and their bodies above all else, it's time to act. At the minimum, state law should ensure that pageants are fostering healthy environments for girls, overseeing things like make-up and costumes.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions oversees labor issues as well as child and family safety issues. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is a long-time women's and girls' advocate in the Senate and is on committee. Please ask Senator Mikulski and her fellow senators on the committee to look into the lack of regulation of the child pageantry industry and the disastrous effects this lack of oversight is having on the health and well-being of our girls.