With all this talk about kids at fully clothed drag shows, I want to talk about my sister - a child beauty pageant winner and “Little Miss [Place in Texas] County”:
My sister is still a minor, so we’ll call her “A”. I was not what that household wanted in a girl, withdrawn, quiet, not interested in the Bible, sports, make up, boys or girlie things. I liked to read and play video games. A is the opposite of me.
A is also a conduit for my stepmothers dreams. My brother and I were disappointments, so now the world revolves around A in my stepmother’s eyes. She plays the same sport my stepmother did, is deeply religious, popular, normal and was a child beauty queen.
It started when she was young. By the time she was 10 she was comfortable with a full body spray tan, full face make-up, press on long nails, hair done up & tiaras, sashes and dresses. These are physical signifiers adults adopt to be sexually attractive.
There’s zero excuse for a 10 year old to need to look attractive. It made my stomach churn. I refused to talk about it, I hate seeing the photos of it. Then she won “Miss [Place in Texas] County” like two years in a row. They wrote about it in the paper. It was just …normal.
And it is normal, sort of. Nobody is calling CPS on a family for their kid being in beauty pageants. Nobody is going “hey, why are you spending time making your kid try to emulate what adults do to look more fuckable?”. It’s just sort of accepted. But it’s pretty sick.
Do I think kids in beauty pageants are being groomed for sexual activity by their parents? For most of them, no. But I’ve seen some weird underlying control issues and damage there. It’s definitely not healthy or good to make little girls feel they have to perform this way
To teach little girls so early their value is in their appearance and their actual appearance isn’t good enough. We certainly were taught we had bodily autonomy or a range of choices. In fact I was taught if I ever dated a black boy my body would be “tainted”
I was told “no nice white boy would ever want me”. Big shocker that commodification of little girls bodies and their value immediately tied into their sexuality is an ideology held among racists right? It’s most certainly political…But nobody calls it “grooming”
The people who don’t even think about this stuff, who this is “normal” to, have all the time in the world to get up in arms about drag shows though where people are fully clothed and the kids don’t have messages about their worth or expectations put on them.
That’s not even to talk about the constant inundation of visuals and messages about heterosexuality, the kids at Hooters, the jokes about boys getting raped by their teachers, the sex jokes in “straight” kids cartoons
If you think the vibes of all this stuff is off, okay, I respect the consistency - but let’s not pretend a drag show where the “it’s not going to lick itself” sign is because that location sells Ice Cream and all the performers are fully dressed is “Grooming”
I certainly never want to hear you fear mongering about LGBTQ people and events “grooming” kids if you’ve never spent any time advocating for actual CSA victims or thinking about the sexualized messages heteronormative culture overwhelms all kids with everyday.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
