Teen Beauty Pageants and Self-Esteem Issues
I turned on the TV tonight, and what was there on one of my measly 5 channels to assail my eyes? The Miss Teen USA Pageant. What garbage. I can’t stand seeing this junk on TV. As if there isn’t enough in movies, music, television and magazines to give girls self-esteem issues and eating disorders, we have to have this nonsense too. People have the nerve to say that pageants boost self esteem and make girls feel beautiful… Only if you’re in one! And even then those girls are either conceited, or they’re depressed and struggling with all the pressure to look and act “perfect”. I feel sorry for them. And I feel sorry for girls around the world that see this stuff, and feel like they’re fat and ugly and worthless because they don’t look like that. Those girls (and women in the adult versions) are incredibly plastic and fake, and not worth looking up to. Teens that idolize these painted Barbie-doll wannabes are in for such a tough time.
What’s even worse are child beauty pageants. You don’t even really want to get me started on that one. I think the idea of putting makeup and skimpy bathing suits on a 6 year-old and strutting them around is not only sick, it’s a blatant advertisement to every pedophile in the area. 9 times out of 10, child beauty pageant entrants are the pretty daughters of ugly mothers who want to vicariously live out the life they could never have. They put the child out like a trophy, like a sexual treat for all to see, just so people don’t look at them and realize what horrible, ugly people they really are. At 4-6 years old, these kids are not choosing this as their lifestyle. Their mothers are. There is no way a 6 year-old wakes up one day and says “Mommy, will you please paint me up like a trollop, and strut me around like so much meat in front of a bunch of deviants?”
Why is it that people can’t accept that there’s beauty in all shapes and sizes? Why do we want our young girls growing up to look and act like sex-pot bimbos? Have you seen teen girls these days? The ones that aren’t depressed and trying to hide from the world because they don’t feel “perfect”, look like 25 year-old prostitutes. I’m sorry, but a 15 year-old child does not need to be going out partying, and she certainly doesn’t need to be going out in a midriff top and a mini skirt. But this is what society is teaching the youth today. It’s all sex sexsex. It really disgusts me. No one looks their age anymore, and girls of 15 & 16 are out having sex because they think it’s what they’re supposed to be doing, then they get pregnant and the rest of their life goes down the tubes. Beautiful way to raise our youth, eh? If the media tells them to look sexy, they’re going to act sexy too. Or at least the media’s idea of sexy, which basically equates to: tramp. Sexy is a state of mind and a way of carrying one’s self, not flat-backing your way through life. Sexy is a voluptuous woman (and by “voluptuous” I mean thick in the right places, not silicone and Botox) who holds her head high, feels beautiful, and turns heads with her mere presence. Sexy is NOT a 16 year-old in a micro-mini and halter top shaking her oversexed backside at everything that walks by. If you’re looking at a girl of 14-16 and thinking, “Whoa! She’s hot!” something’s wrong, unless you’re a 14-16 year-old boy.
I really wonder what happened to teaching girls how to be ladies, and when we slipped into letting them become tramps. It’s disgusting, and it’s sad. If you have a daughter, know what she’s wearing. Find out if she goes to school and changes into her friends’ street-wear. (You know girls do that.) Teach her to respect herself, and that showing skin does not make her beautiful. Beautiful comes from the inside, and god knows it can change over time. Former ugly duckling, speaking from experience. Even now, I’m not society’s idea of beautiful, and I never will be. But I don’t give a flip either. I AM beautiful, in my own way. I am strong and tough and resilient, and I have turned more than a few men’s heads in my day. (and a few women’s for that matter) Teach your daughters and nieces and sisters that beauty is who you are, how you carry yourself, and what you think of yourself, not what struts down a runway or slinks across a magazine cover. You can be heavy, you can have braces, you can have a crew cut, and still be beautiful. And when you’re old enough, you can learn the true meaning of sexy. The kid years don’t last; don’t mess them up by getting a bad rep, getting pregnant, or getting some disease that will cut your life off before it even gets going. For now, try to enjoy being a kid, you’ll have the rest of your life to be a woman.
