Toddlers & Tiaras/TLC/Tuesdays at 10pm

By Imogen V. Shahrazad

When I was a little girl, I read books about cats and horses and barely brushed my hair. In fact, when my mom insisted on combing out the snarls, I frequently cried. I wore gigantic, ill-fitting t-shirts until I was thirteen. So you can imagine how little I could relate to the pageant girls of TLC’s reality show Toddlers & Tiaras.

The show highlights one child pageant per episode in locales as varied as Pittsburgh, PA, to small town Georgia. The girls, ranging in age from barely walking to the brink of puberty, sashay awkwardly across the stage in glittering dresses so expensive their parents missed a mortgage payment, while eager beaver pageant moms (an unmistakable breed, similar to Chihuahuas) mime the girls’ choreography and pray their children’s parade float-sized hairdos don’t fall flat like bad soufflés.

Tacky? Yeah. But, as an unabashed feminist and generally concerned human being, I also find it fairly alarming.

It’s difficult to tell what is worse: the parents’ seemingly blind enthusiasm for kiddie pageants or the kids’ confusion regarding whether or not they actually like competing. At the Stars of Pennsylvania pageant (a glitz pageant, as opposed to a natural pageant, whatever that means), we meet, among others, Meadow, Angela, and Roni. Meadow, a seven-year-old future Stepford wife, has competed in over one hundred pageants. Angela is a sweet eight-year-old from a large family, and Roni is a highly entertaining and petulant two-year-old.

My first concern is financial: while Meadow’s family seems to have no trouble paying thousands of dollars for a dress she’ll grow out of in three months, Angela is only one of five kids in a military family and Roni’s mother requires her own mother’s help to pay for pageant accoutrement—in the form of moving back into her mom’s house because she can’t pay the rent. While there’s no shame in having financial difficulties, is it justifiable in the face of the possibility that these girls don’t even like pageants?

While Meadow is a lost cause (at this point, the poor thing is practically a My Size Barbie), Roni expresses her desire to go swimming rather than continue the pageant (and later falls asleep in her mother’s arms, as toddlers do). Perhaps the saddest moment is when Angela doesn’t win the big crown and tells the camera, in heartbreaking monotone, “I like natural pageants more than glitz pageants.”

Pro-pageant people argue that competition boosts the girls’ self-esteem and provides them a fun hobby, but seeing little girls in sequined dresses, spray tans, and hair pieces cry over losing the top title is, to put it simply, soul crushing. Girls don’t need to hear that their worth is wrapped up in their ability to blow kisses at judges or smile the prettiest; they get enough of that just watching television and living in America.

Little girls need to be what they are: kids. They should play in the dirt with My Little Ponies and read bedtime stories with their parents. They should sing and dance to Yo Gabba Gabba, not struggle through some unnecessarily complicated choreography in a room full of strangers. If my six-year-old sister ever told me she wanted to do a pageant, I’d sob. Loudly.

Oh, and you know the thing that freaks me out the most? Flippers. Flippers are fake teeth the kids can slip on over their real teeth to hide gaps from lost baby teeth. OH. MY. GOD.