06.02.2010
TLC has become my drug. It’s disgusting, foul, wrong on so many levels, and yet, I can’t stop watching it lately. Is there a Reality Show Anonymous group meeting somewhere? I need to join.
The latest disgusting show that I’ve sat through is called Toddlers & Tiaras. Just when I thought that Jon and Kate Plus Eight was rock bottom for the TV station…nope, I was proven wrong. In fact, it’s not just the show. It’s the fact that people do this to their little girls. Look at this picture:
How is this normal? If you’re going to put your kid in a pageant, why does she have to be a Barbie doll? Can’t there be a pageant about how fast a child can run? Or how about whether or not the kid knows her ABCs? I don’t understand the fascination with pageants. I sat through ONE (too many) Miss America pageants in my life – back in the 1980s, I think. It was painful not just because the contestants wouldn’t stop fake smiling or that they couldn’t put a sentence together, but I sat watching them feeling like shit because I didn’t have the kind of body they were strutting on stage.
Just look at these photos:
This isn't cute! Cute is a little girl in pigtails with jeans, Sketchers, and a cute T-shirt with, like, Hello Kitty on it. Cute is a little girl in a polka dotted dress. Cute is not a little girl with the face of a 25 year-old.
And if you watch the show, many of these girls are being taught that they are so special that they are to be waited on hand and foot and that every whim and desire is to be catered to because they are beautiful. Little girls as young as 2 are demanding and throwing temper tantrums because they don’t like something. And not your typical tantrum that 2 year-olds throw. It’s teenaged-level tantrums at the age of 2! It’s gross. One girl insisted on having a stage name that, OK, I get it. Many performers have stage names, but the way this girl was talking about her stage name vs. who she is in “real life,” kept me thinking about the fact that I think she actually had a multiple personality disorder. And if not that, then there was just something off about her. I don’t care what anybody says, sometimes you can just tell.
I know that I’m going to be up crap creek if I ever have a little girl who is a girly-girl. I will have great difficulty relating to her because I’ve always been a tomboy, getting my hands dirty and climbing trees. (Although I always made sure to have the right accessories with me.) Despite being overweight, I was into sports and am way too competitive – much to Rob’s dismay at times. I hate(d) shopping and it wasn’t until college that I discovered make-up. But even to this day I would rather sleep in than get up 30 minutes early to make-up my face.
But I AM open enough that if I did have a girly-girl, that I would do what I could to accept that and support that, but hell if I put her in a pageant. That might make me wrong but I really do think that pageants teach girls all the wrong things. Many of the moms and grandmoms on the show claim that pageants give their (grand)daughters confidence and that’s the reason they put them in. Well, I hate to break it to you…but there are plenty of other ways for girls to gain confidence and NOT be paraded around like pieces of meat from the time they're infants.[1]
[1] Pictures from Google Images, running a search for Toddlers & Tiaras.
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