‘A Princess Is Made Not Born’

This week the upper house of the French parliament passed a piece of legislation aimed at criminalising children’s beauty pageants, so called ‘Mini-Miss’ competitions on the grounds that they are responsible for the hypersexualisation of girls under the age of sixteen. The policy specifically targets the organisers of child beauty pageants, who may face a jail term of up to two years and a fine of 30,000 euros if the ban passes into law.

Despite being initiated by a politician on the centre-right, Ms Chantal Jouanno, a senator and former sports minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, the measure has considerable cross-party support and whilst the legislation still has to be approved by the National Assembly to become law, it is expected to pass through with a relatively small number of amendments.

At first glance the penalties may seem extreme for what most people perceive as a relatively harmless competition for young children. They may also be called reactionary, especially since they come off the back of uproar caused by a controversial spread in Vogue in 2010 which featured ten year old girls dressed in make-up and high-heels, supposedly emulating their mothers.

However if you’ve ever seen a clip of the American reality series, ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’, centering around a seven-year old pageant monster called Alana Thompson,  then these reforms appear long overdue in stopping one of the creepiest industries in mainstream Western culture. Pageants are perceived as being wholly within the domain of the USA, and as a result their spread across the globe has gone almost unnoticed. Aware as we are of pageants like Miss Universe, Miss America and Miss GB, ‘Mini-Miss’ competitions take place under the radar in this country. Perhaps because they operate in such a niche market, only concerning parents and girls of a certain age and attitude, they are not particularly evident in the public consciousness, and we don’t generally associate them as part of British culture. Even with films like Little Miss Sunshine casting light on the dubious ethics of child beauty competitions, we have yet to collectively realise that there is something fundamentally wrong with judging a six-year old girl on her appearance.

Whilst the industry is nothing like as large as it is in the US, Britain has numerous beauty pageants aimed at children and ‘tweens’. One competition, Miss Mini Princess, claims to be ‘UK’s prestige Princess Pageant’, a ‘USA style beauty pageant with a British attitude’ and features the tagline “A Princess is Made not Born”. There are five age categories, Baby Princess (Under 1), Tiny Princess (1 -2 year olds), Little Princess (3-5 year olds), Petite Princess (6-9 year olds) and Little Miss Princess (10-12 year olds). Types of rounds include modelling swimwear and evening dress, as well as exhibiting talent and beauty.

The Anglo-Saxon West condemns child-brides, child pornography and under-age sex. How then does it permit an entire industry to be based on parading children dressed as adults performing adult-style glamour modelling? There has already been a crackdown on suggestive or inappropriate clothing designed for children, such as padded bras for ten-year old girls and crop-tops that bear the slogan ‘future porn star’. In 2011 a Government-commissioned review into the sexualisation of children by Reg Bailey, head of the Mothers’ Union led to a ban on sexually-suggestive clothes for children. Most criticism was targeted at bikinis and bras marketed at under-16s that enhanced and sexualised the wearer’s breasts and body. The Daily Mail has been at the forefront of the press campaign to prevent the sexualisation of children, despite their own dubious descriptions of young girls and women; anyone remember the comments about the ‘blossoming’ Obama daughters?

Will Britain follow in France’s footsteps? It does seem odd to think that while Operation Yewtree rages on, we are not yet turning an eye towards the other end of the problem; towards the sexualisation of children and the pressures surrounding adolescence image. The current attitude towards ‘Mini-Miss’ pageants in this country is one of laissez faire, that parents know what is best for their children and will act accordingly. Of course this is simply not true. If it was there wouldn’t be a market for crop-tops for five-year-olds with ‘future porn star’ splashed across them. It’s an easy leap to presume that these are the same parents who think that dressing their daughters as living barbies and persuading them to prance around a stage for sixty seconds in a baby-bikini is beneficial to their development. Not only does it create an entirely false conception of what the child has to offer the world (i.e, her body and looks), but it brings a self-consciousness that is entirely out of place within a child’s mentality. Extreme youth contains the most blissful ignorance of snap-judgements and instant rejection, and to take that away is frankly abhorrent. Its true children can be cruel, but so can adults, and they can do it better and more exploitatively. France is finally making a stand, and we should stand with them.