Child Beauty Pageants Down Under

I had an article published in The Age yesterday about the ways in which women are judged on their appearance. I aimed to connect two superficially unrelated things, SlutWalks and the upcoming protests about American-style child beauty pageants arriving in Australia.

After I'd finished the initial draft of the piece, an item kept popping up on the news about a woman in the United States who had apparently injected her 8-year-old daughter with Botox. It seemed like a perfect, though rare, example of actual physical abuse related to pageants, like the videos that had been circulating of a woman waxing her young daughter's eyebrows for a pageant.

The next development reported on Good Morning America was that the girl's mother, "Kerry Campbell", was being investigated for cruel treatment of her daughter, Britney, and that the child had been removed from the family home. Recalling such fame-seeking lows as the "balloon boy" hoax, "Kerry" is actually Sheena Upton, a woman who claims not to know what Botox is.

The revised story has it that Sheena was paid by the tabloid The Sun to fabricate her tale of taking to her daughter's "wrinkles" with Botox. For what ended up being a fairly extensive media blitz, she received a paltry $200 from the paper, but I believe far more from the television programs who eagerly interviewed her, curious to speak with a mother who caused pain to her daughter in the pursuit of beauty.

In response, Jezebel suggests that our instincts should have told us that no mother would really have hurt her child in this way. It should, perhaps, have been obvious that this was a hoax. If it is the case that The Sun has a recent history of fabricating other stories along these lines, I wonder why this is. What kind of popular desire are these invented tall-tales about syringe-wielding mothers filling?

Though the landscape changes with this particular story with each day, making it hard to attempt any kind of analysis, it seems much like we want to believe that pageant mothers will go to any lengths to have their daughters be recognised as winners. The Sun, which is alleged to have staged the hoax, is a British tabloid. Perhaps both Britons and Australians are eager for stories that provide support to their scepticism about American-style child beauty pageants and fabricated stories like this are seen to meet a desire to tar pageant mothers as so competitive that there is no line that they will not cross?

It does not seem too far-fetched to imagine that if a mother is willing to spend thousands of dollars on a pageant dress, insert false teeth into her daughter's mouth, wax her legs, have her photos retouched and perhaps most offensively of all, have her learn a song like "Cutie Patootie" that she might go one step further and inject her with Botox. It seems patently ridiculous that an 8-year-old would have any discernible "wrinkles" to speak of, but so many other standard elements of American beauty pageants for girls seem similarly unthinkable to me that it is indeed hard to know when you're being taken for a ride.

The Royal Wedding and the Princess Myth

I've been a one-woman media blitz today commenting on the Royal Wedding and princess culture for girls. The video above is from a TV spot on ABC's News Breakfast program. And here is an article in The Conversation that allows me to say what I really mean without the pressure of live-to-air television.

Yesterday I did an interview on Life Matters for ABC Radio and you can hear the audio at this link. It's a shame there's not a Royal wedding more often as I'm finally getting the hang of talking about it. I'm actually amazed that Australians are so interested in it, given our usual blase attitude to the monarchy. Then again, we have wrangled Fitzy and Dame Edna into the commentary so it's not exactly reverent adoration.

Because I am a Girl

It's ANZAC day here in Australia. I do tear up a little thinking of the boys and young men who volunteered to fight without really knowing what they had gotten themselves into, or of those who were conscripted and had no say in the matter at all. It's worthwhile to have a day to reflect on the horrors of war and on the impact it has made on each individual who chose to participate or who were forced to take part. I always find the day to provide the perfect answer to why we should avoid armed conflict, rather than finding that it glorifies the concept of war, though I know the ANZAC mythology has been misused at times.

Plan International has been running a major international campaign, "Because I am Girl", for several years now and they're currently lobbying the United Nations to make 22 September International Day of the Girl. While women have aided in armed conflicts as nurses and combatants, ANZAC day is largely about men's involvement in war. International Women's Day is cause for us to reflect on what women have achieved in fighting for equal rights to vote and to work, and on the continued struggle for broader equality. A day to reflect on what it means to grow up as a girl in the developing world seems like a real priority at this moment. The struggle for girls' and women's welfare is more urgent in the developing countries where they are more likely to be malnourished, uneducated, afflicted with HIV, married young or sexually exploited.

The 2010 Plan report on the state of the world's girls reminds us that the problem is not only confined to rural communities. Cities are also inhospitable places to girls and the cities of the developing world see five million more people added to them each month. While this rapid growth means the threat of violence in the street and slums increases, it also holds out some hope for improvement as city girls are more likely to attend school, have better access to health care, and to be able to enjoy their girlhood for a longer period without being married before they have had the chance to mature.

Astonishly, during the 2010 Street Child World Cup girls who had lived in shelters and on the streets in the UK, Tanzania, South Africa, the Philippines, Brazil and Nicaragua developed their own manifesto to lobby those in power. All seem like reasonable demands that we should feel more global responsibility to ensure:

"We the street girls have the following rights and we want them respected:
The Right to live in a shelter and home
The Right to have a family
The Right to be safe
The Right to be protected from sexual abuse
The Right to go to school and get free education
The Right to good health and access to free health services
The Right to be heard
The Right to belong
The Right to be treated with respect and decency
The Right to be treated as equal to boys
The Right to be allowed to grow normally."

So many girls have seen and endured things that rival the sufferings of soldiers in combat. Why don't we remember them too?

Glamour: Women, History, Feminism by Carol Dyhouse

There are two kinds of academic book. The kind you borrow from the library because you are researching a topic and just have to have some kind of authoritative quotation on ‘x’, for which you trawl the index, find your relevant term, persevere with the whole chapter to understand the context, and then move on. And then there is the kind that you willingly spend your own money on, with the express intent of reading it from cover to cover for *gasp* enjoyment. I’m guessing most people find the majority of academic monographs to fall into the first category. I’ve had a good run lately of two books read from beginning to end for leisure, Carol Dyhouse’s history of glamour and Marah Gubar’s history of children’s literature. I’ll leave Gubar for a subsequent post.

Carol Dyhouse was unfairly reduced to a name in my dissertation bibliography until I saw Glamour: Women, History and Feminism in a Zed Books catalogue. She has published several books on women and education, as well as the must-cite-in-literature-review Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939.

Dyhouse teases out what glamour encompasses, which she argues is not simply beauty or what is fashionable. Glamour speaks “of power, sexuality and transgression” (3). The fascinating first chapter on the origins of glamour shows its movement from a term referring to witchery to draw in ideas of the exotic. Advertisements from 1920s periodicals beautifully complement Dyhouse’s narrative, showing the allure of the orient. For instance, Shem-el-Nessim (The Scent of Araby) suggests “Oriental luxury”, while Wana-Ranee (The Purfume of Ceylon) “distinguishes the woman of taste”. The opening chapter also introduces one the central threads of the story of glamour: the rise and fall of women’s obsession with fur as a sign of luxury.

Glamour then zooms in on the popularisation of glamour on the silver screen, noting a return to shapely figures in the 1930s “with three sets of twin heart-shaped curves: lips, bosom, behind” (38). Cosmetics, and even cosmetic surgery, were integral to carefully constructing the illusion of glamour, along with an attitude of sexual confidence. Dyhouse also considers how British girls and young women were influenced by movie star fashion and lifestyle in magazines such as Girl’s Cinema, Women’s Filmfair, Film Fashionland and Picturegoer. And who said the obsession with the lives of celebrities was a recent phenomenon?

The book reads changes in perceptions of glamour alongside major historical transformations, such as that provoked by the Second World War with the emergence of the “New Look” (“a last look at a vanishing conception of femininity” (83). She also brings class differences to bear in her analysis, especially in considering the differences in how girls would be introduced into society and groomed for womanhood. Dress showed class credentials and gradually the dissolution of formal, matronly dress at the end of the 1950s (formerly a marker of appropriate class membership) allowed girls to wear more youthful clothing.

The sweep through the second half of the twentieth century is equally grounded in social change from beauty pageants to women in the boardroom and grunge. Perhaps revealing my own “period bias”, I was most intrigued by the first two chapters grounded in the 1920s and 1930s, yet the story that Dyhouse has to tell is a must-read from beginning to end in the same way as a gripping novel.

Sometimes popular reads dispense with scholarly rigour, but Dyhouse’s meticulous research is thoroughly detailed in her extensive notes and is evident in the wonderful examples she teases out. I was compelled to look up Evening in Paris perfume, created in 1929 by Bourjois, after reading that it still evokes vivid memories in the women who once wore it as young glamorous things, especially during World War Two. The sites that sell rare, unopened bottles of the scent show that one generation’s concept of glamour remains with them forever, even while ideals of femininity shift around them. Should we be stashing away Jean Paul Gaultier’s “Classique” in its corseted female torso bottles now in preparation for 2070?

Article at The Conversation on Bad Girls and Tricky Women

The new website The Conversation has launched today. It's a collaborative venture by the Group of Eight universities to deliver "an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector." The debut collection of articles looks more interesting than the vision that this description might suggest.

I was asked to write an article inspired by the recent St Kilda schoolgirl scandal about bad girls and tricky women throughout history and literature.

My Sexy Pony

This is a chance for another materially deprived childhood recollection. I had always wanted a My Little Pony, which was quite the trend in the 1980s for girls, right up there with Cabbage Patch Kids. While it was only the outright spoiled girl who would tote more than one of those ugly dolls (the same kind who owned the Barbie Ferrari), many a girl had enough ponies to open their own horse stud. I did receive some kind of cheap imitation at one point, whose mane and tail I still brushed and combed, but my heart just wasn't in it, as it didn't have all the signs of authenticity like a cute little symbol on its rump.

I also recall a miniature explosion of outrage by a writer in Bitch magazine a few years ago, in response to the redesigned version of the Pony. The new Pony was much more sophisticated in its look compared with the shy, dumpy original. The author went as far as to say that the new My Little Pony was extremely sexualised, especially as it seemed to be "assuming the position" in the presentation of its rear end. The following edition included a number of letters from readers who accused the author of "reading too much into it"- the common accusation levelled at most people working on deconstructing children's literature.

If My Little Pony for the new millenium was debatable as to its sexualisation, there is no room for doubt with a new horse toy for girls called Struts. With their high heels and excessive jewellery, the name does leave the toy open to an unfortunate rhyme. What is perhaps most disturbing about the Struts is that they no longer only represent a horse, but seem caught midway between animal and human. It's a horse-girl hybrid, with ultra-long legs in gigantic platform heels and the impossibly large eyes of a Bratz doll. Psychologist Dale Atkins calls the Struts' eyelashes "flirtatious".

Unlike My Little Pony, which seemed tailored to the masses of girls who had fantasies of owning and grooming horses, the Struts seem more about mimicking the process of women dressing up in heels, make-up and ultra-feminine pink and lacy clothing. I am not opposed to girls dressing up or playing with make-up, but the Struts seem part of the ongoing reinforcement of girls' need to be sexual, or to learn to be sexually attractive (not just pretty), at a young age. It no longer seems like fun for a five-year-old when even a horse toy has to be sexy.

Fairy Tales Re-Imagined at ACMI

Today was the first day of the Fairy Tales Re-Imagined symposium at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. This morning I was surprised to find a cinema full of several hundred eager participants.

The first session described a spectacular online documentary project from the ABC called Re-Enchantment. There were two sessions involving the author and director Sarah Gibson- also a Jungian analyst (can't say I've met one before)- who brings amazing psychological insight to readings of fairy tales. I'm now keen to see her three-part documentary series Myths of Childhood.

The second session focussed on the Little Red Riding Hood story, particularly wolves and the idea of devouring and being devoured. I was spellbound by the artwork and history presented by printmaker Jazmina Cininas, who undertook the Girlie Werewolf Project as part of her PhD at RMIT. Her striking images appear in this blog post.

According to Jazmina's research, there were numerous girls and women who rode wolves from the 16th century, which was a crime when practiced by females. These records flowed through to some lesser known examples of purported female werewolves, with Jazmina's own works taking much from the historical circumstances of women's imagined devious relationships with magic (for instance, imagery of particular plants and flowers, such as hemlock, associated with she-wolves and witches). It was a revelation to find girl werewolves almost five centures before the Ginger Snaps films.

The final session concentrated on the Cinderella story and its place in contemporary culture. Meredith Jones from The University of Technololgy Sydney read the tale into contemporary makeover culture, from reality television trainwrecks like The Swan to Michael Jackson and Lad Gaga. I was intrigued by the connection between Meredith's argument that makeovers foreground the process of becoming, just as fairy tales give us pleasure through the process of the heroine becoming the princess (rather than how wonderful the prince might be as a husband, the children that may issue as a result etc.). What happens during "ever after" is not important.

This session also included an absolutely fascinating and rich paper by Peter Mitchell (also from UTS) on the significance of the "light shoe" for women, to shed light on ubiquitous glass slipper. I haven't spared much thought about the evolution and importance of footwear, apart from footbinding and the repercussions of high heels on poor feet and the ability to remain upright, but I was humbled into the realisation that the history of dress has major implications for the construction of gender. I really had no idea that men also wore high heels at court, and that they did symbolise power in terms of adding height to the wearer.

Tomorrow promises sessions on the use of fairy tales in creative works and the enticingly titled "The Forbidden Room: From Bluebeard to CSI". It was suggested today that the contemporary crime drama is a modern way of confronting death in the same way as the fairy tale did in the past, so I'm keen to hear Catherine Cole's paper "Death as Entertainment". I think my enthusiasm perhaps proves the point already.