Exposure to Toddlers & Tiaras may have brought new life to the concept of beauty pageants. While it’s doing quite well in the United States, the French parliament voted to end beauty patents for girls younger than 16. The reason – the fear of “hypersexual” young girls.
Pageants are supposedly popular in smaller towns across France, but its intensity cannot even come close to that of the United States. In a country that is synonymous with fashion and beauty, France has no equivalent of Toddlers & Tiaras or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
“It is extremely destructive for a girl between the age of 6 and 12 to hear her mother say that what’s important for her is to be beautiful,” Chantal Jouanno, the ban’s champion, said Wednesday. “We are fighting to say: What counts is what they have in their brains.”
Jouanno wrote a report on the “hypersexualisation” of children in 2011, and it highlighted the use of under-age girls in sexy clothes and provocative postures. While France does (or in this case, did) have beauty pageants, they prohibited bathing suit competitions and girls were encouraged to dress up more like fairy-tale princess, other than femme fatales.
Beauty pageants for young girls have been known to warp the concept of beauty among young girls, surging the image of sexualised, pre-pubescent girls. Did you think it’s a good idea for the French government to ban pageants for young girls? Share your thoughts.
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