Beauty Pageants are meant to show the world how poised and well-articulated a young girl is. However, it can also show the world what society thinks a girl should be, beautiful and well-behaved. Girls need to understand that the world is not simply what judges expect in a pageant show. As much as pageant shows want to highlight the talents of young girls, in reality, beauty pageants value beauty and aesthetic above all else. A successful beauty pageant contestant has to wear the right clothes, look a certain way, and act a certain way. There is limited to few ways to be different, to express one's self. That is why beauty pageants may be deemed harmful to a girl.
Pageants teach conformity. They teach appreciation of shallow things. Most importantly, it teaches girls that if one does not have the best dress or the best makeup, they will not make it…...

mla

References

Abraham, Tamara. '$400 Entry Fees And $4,000 Dresses: Toddlers And Tiaras Mom Reveals Eye-Watering Costs Of Child Pageants'. Mail Online. N.p., 2011. Web. 27 Oct. 2015.

Cartwright, Martina. 'Child Beauty Pageants: What Are We Teaching Our Girls?'.Psychology Today. N.p., 2015. Web. 27 Oct. 2015.

Merino, Noe-l. Beauty Pageants. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2010. Print.

Scwartz, Allan. '"Toddlers And Tiaras" Beauty Pageants: Are They Good For Our Children? - Child Development And Parenting: Early Childhood'.Mentalhelp.net. N.p., 2015. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.

beauty pageant is accompanied by a public outcry: "How dare you objectify women." For me however, participation in a recent Asian-American beauty contest was life-affirming. The social-awareness programs that the contestants contributed towards cemented my career goals. I feel today, that I am on the cusp of making significant contributions to a failing and defeatist health care industry. And, I bring to the table educational and work experience, industriousness, motivation and talent. Graduate work leading to a Master's degree in Public Health (MPH) will help fulfill my avocation of making a difference.
I have a Bachelor's degree in legal studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and work experience as a regional account manager at a health-care management institution. I also have experience in dispute resolution, financial and budget management, and marketing, all in health-care and biotechnology. I am very proud of my work with senior citizens for whom…...

Beauty Pageants Should Be Banned
Child Beauty Pageant Practices (Busting, 2011)

Overview of the Pageant

Beauty pageants started it the 1920s when the owner of an Atlantic City hotel came up with the idea as an attraction to boost tourism revenues. The idea caught on in a handful of cities that would hold versions of a "Most Beautiful Child" contests across the country. Over the years this industry expanded in 1964 to include children adn there were over 35,000 participants which prompted the need to begin to use different age divisions to separate the children. Today, the child pageant industry has boomed and the level of competition has reached unprecedented heights.

Now there are over 25,000 individual pageants held each year and the industry is estimated to generate over a billion dollars each year (Busting, 2011). However, the growth of this industry has prompted many researchers to consider the consequences that these types of…...

mla

Works Cited

Busting, M. (2011, October 28). Child Beauty Pageant. Retrieved from The Daily Omnivore:  http://thedailyomnivore.net/2011/10/28/child-beauty-pageant/ 

Nussabaum, K. (2013, Spring). Children and Beauty Pageants. Retrieved from Michele Polak:  http://www.michelepolak.com/3099spring13/Weekly_Schedule_files/Nussbaum.pdf 

Wolfe, L. (2012). Darling Divas or Damaged Daughters? The Dark Side of Child Beauty Pageants and an Administrative Law Solution. Tulane Law Review, 427.

France, a country known for its makeup, clothing, and beauty industries, has recently banned child beauty pageants (Cruz, 2013). It is widely believed that child beauty pageants are harmful to children's mental, emotional, and even physical health, as well as injurious to public health. If France has deemed the pageants and the culture they represent as being detrimental to child development, then the rest of the world might follow suit. There are already calls to ban child beauty pageants based on recent social scientific evidence showing that they can cause real harm to young people. While some parents have defended the pageants on the grounds that they help their children overcome shyness or develop the skills necessary to gain "poise and confidence," none of those claims are based on fact ("The Whys and Woes of Child Beauty Pageants," 2000). Quite the contrary, research studies are showing that the pageants may…...

mla

References

Agadoni, L. (2015). How do child beauty pageants affect a child's development. Global Post. Retrieved online:  http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/child-beauty-pageants-affect-childs-development-3088.html 

Cartwright, M.M. (2011). Child beauty pageants. Psychology Today. Retrieved online: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/food-thought/201108/child-beauty-pageants-what-are-we-teaching-our-girls

Cruz, D. (2013). The French government bans child beauty pageants and I hope it catches on. HuffPost. Nov 20, 2013. Retrieved onliner:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/18/child-beauty-pageant-ban_n_3947102.html 

Nauert, R. (n.d.). Child beauty pageants may be more about parents. Psych Central. Retrieved online:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/10/29/child-beauty-pageants-may-be-more-about-parents/46818.html

Children's Beauty Pageants:
A phenomenon in need of greater regulation

Given the tabloid attention given to children's beauty pageants, the question of whether children should be allowed to participate in these venues has been given increased scrutiny. Proponents of pageants state that they boost participants' self-esteem or at worst do no harm. However, it is the contention of this essay that far from being harmless talent competitions, the pageants raise real questions about children's consent and also raise troubling concerns about the use of children as spectacles of entertainment. They should be subject to increased regulation if not an outright ban.

Children's beauty pageants have been controversial since their inception in the 1960s. Children's pageants have been around almost as long as their adult incarnations. The industry is virtually unregulated (unlike, for example, children who act in sitcoms or movies, who are subject to child labor laws). "According to the Attorney General of…...

mla

Works Cited

"Are Beauty Pageants harmful to women?' Debate.org. Web. 22 Apr 2015.

Cartwright, Martina. "Child Beauty Pageants: What Are We Teaching Our Girls?" Psychology

Today. 12 Aug 2011. Web. 22 Apr 2015.

"Child Beauty Pageant Statistics." Occupy Theory. 20 Dec 2014. Web. 22 Apr 2015.

Child Beauty Pageants
Children's beauty pageants have gotten a great deal of negative publicity in recent years, partially because of the sensationalistic coverage in the media via shows like Toddlers and Tiaras. The program depicts the vicious, back-biting, behind-the-scenes drama of competition in which young children dress up as much older, highly sexualized women often because they are pushed to do so by overly driven stage mothers. However, criticisms of beauty pageants for both children and adults stretch far back in history and are much older than reality television. hat is particularly noteworthy today is the extent to which pageants have become a metaphor for the over-sexualization of children, particularly young girls. The message conveyed by the pageants seems very different from the empowering message embraced by other aspects of the media regarding the ability of girls to demonstrate their worth outside of the context of sexuality and domesticity.

To understand the…...

mla

Works Cited

Anderson, L.V. "What was the deal with Graham Greene calling Shirley Temple a fancy little piece?" Slate. 12 Feb 2014. Web. 17 May 2017.

"The feminists vs. The contestants." Time. 2011. Web. 17 May 2017.

Levy, Hilary. "The evolution of American-style child beauty pageants." The Huffington Post.

17 May 2011.

Children's Beauty Pageants
A girl, heavily made up, smiles at the camera. She is wearing a low-cut gown, false eyelashes, and high heels. She is three years old. In most other contexts, we would find this shockingly inappropriate. Yet the girl's mother is waving, smiling, and egging the child on. And worse yet, others are judging the child based upon her ability to convincingly mimic adult sexuality. The girl may have been kept up for long hours the night before so her appearance could be perfected. She will be given a prize or deemed to be invalid almost solely upon her ability to show that she is beautiful in a highly conventional Barbie-doll fashion.

Children's beauty pageants are a subculture of American life but they exemplify a wider social problem, namely the sexualizing of children, particularly girls, at increasingly young ages. As well as in the media, the hyper-sexualization of girls is…...

mla

References

APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. APA. 2007. Web. 2 May 2015.

Ornstein, Peggy. "Career Barbie and the sexualization of little girls." Pacific Standard.

13 Mar 2014. Web. 2 May 2015.

Table of child entertainment provisions. DOL. Web. 2 May 2015.

It has kept going ever since" (Cavendish, 2001, p. 66). Morley's wife, Julia (a former beauty pageant winner) joined him in 1970 to help organize the competition to help maintain the contestants' morals and to ensure their modesty was suitably protected ("not invariably with success") (Cavendish, p. 67). Miss World has subsequently attracted television audiences in almost every country in the world and has earned an enormous amount of money for charity (Cavendish, 2001).
During the first few years of the competition, the Miss Great Britain title was a highly prized award, but Cooke suggests that it represented one of the only ways women had at the time to express themselves in a legitimate fashion: "My feeling," she says, is that it was, perversely, a kind of liberation for some women -- a way of making their only assets and their skills (the application of lipstick, the ability to walk…...

mla

References

Beauty Business, the. (2000, August). Business Asia, 8(12), 36.

Cavendish, R. (2001, April). The First Miss World Contest. History Today, 51(4), 64.

Cooke, R. (June 14, 2004). Girls, girls, girls. New Statesman, 133(4692), 38.

David M. Dozier and Martha M. Lauzen. (2002). You Look Mahvelous: An Examination of Gender and Appearance Comments in the 1999-2000 Prime-Time Season. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 429.

Even during the golden years of the beauty contest between the wars there were unresolved problems with the nature and purpose of such competitions:
There remained elements of discomfort and tension, only superficially palliated by the scientific discourse, patriotic rhetoric and philanthropic gestures of the contest's organisers. These tensions would be released again in the 1970s when a new generation of feminists added discrimination on the grounds of race and disability, together with a more unequivocal rejection of standardised and homogenised ideals of the body and beauty, to the critique of their forebears.

Yet this phenomenon can be seen as consistent with the change in the status of the beauty contest, from a celebration of values that were of universal appeal (even reflecting ideals of national identity) to a tawdry matter of selling sex. y the 1980s and 1990s such contests were experiencing a decline in entrants, with young women no…...

mla

Bibliography

Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999

Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk and Beverly Stoeltje (eds), Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests and Power, New York and London, Routledge, 1997. Useful collection of essays with a global perspective.

Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983). A detailed study of the history of the Miss America contest.

Liz Conor, 'Beauty contestant in the photographic scene', Journal of Australian Studies, no 71, (2001). Interesting points on the importance of modern communication/reproduction technologies in 1920s beauty contests.

Sexyuality
Sexuality

The 1950's and Sexuality

World War II can be seen as an ending and then a beginning for different eras. Prior to the war, the world was in a the most severe economic downturn that anyone had experienced in modern times, whereas the 1950's were one of the most prosperous times in American history. The prewar years were fraught with struggle for between the wealthy elite and the poor. There was a relatively small middle class that served the wealthy and helped to dominate the poor. After the war, people, as a whole, had more economic opportunity, and the middle class grew astronomically. The war also separated America's ideas of what a woman was from what she could become. During the war women had been required to work in factories doing jobs that were normally reserved for men. Women could be teachers, nurses, or mothers before 1945, but the long climb…...

mla

References

Lester, N.A. (2010). Disney's "The Princess and the Frog": The pride, the pressure and the politics of being a first. Journal of American Culture, 33(4), 294-310.

Sharp, G. (2009). 1950s beauty pageant judging guidelines. Retrieved from   guidelines/http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/22/1950s-beauty-pageant-judging -

Williams, Z. (2005). The fifties ideal of sexuality was serious: Less flesh, more promise. New Statesman, 134(4741), 28-33.

Edit
Geena Rocero is a model with a purpose. Rocero was born and raised in the Philippines, and recently returned to her homeland to help victims of Typhoon Haiyan. In the midst of a busy schedule, Rocero spends time in her first interview because she feels that sharing her life story is one of the first steps toward helping others. "e're all in this journey together," Rocero exclaims.

Coincidentally, the interview falls on Transgender Day of Remembrance, which commemorates all transmen and transwomen who lost their lives because of targeted attacks. "Transwomen of color are the most marginalized," Rocero reminds us. "70% of hate crime in the LGBT community is committed against transwomen of color. I want this to change. I need this to change. I get so emotional about this and I'm reminded how privileged I am," she says with tears in her eyes.

Rocero works as a model but recently,…...

mla

When she was a young girl, Rocero knew she was female. Her dream was to become a model. She borrowed her sister's clothes, wore her mom's lipstick, entered local beauty pageants, and eventually self-medicated with hormones. Her parents, especially her mom, supported Geena and helped her to enter beauty pageants. When she was 17, Rocero moved to the United States. She was able to work in the United States and save enough money for the gender reassignment surgery, which she had done at age 19. In fact, while on her upcoming trip to Thailand, Rocero is meeting her surgeon to "thank him for giving me a wonderful vagina."

After her sexual reassignment surgery, Geena pursued her dream of modeling. She moved to New York City in 2005 and while working as a bar hostess, met a photographer who helped her develop a portfolio. That same year, Rocero signed with her first modeling agency. Currently, Rocero is signed with NEXT Model Management. In addition to modeling, Geena has worked as a makeup artist with Benefit Cosmetics, a manager at Inc. Magazine, and a sales representative for First Go Green biodegradable products. Rocero has also worked with the Summit Series, an entrepreneurial organization, to learn how to collaborate with partners on achieving mutual goals. It was because of her broad working experience and her networking with Summit Series contacts that Rocero has been able to develop a plan for promoting her public policy initiatives around the world. Rocero's ultimate goal is to transform public policy at the trans-national level. Her vision is to serve as an ambassador for transgender issues with the United Nations.

Rocero knows she has led a privileged life because of supportive friends, supportive family members, and a supportive spiritual community in both her native Philippines and in the United States. Rocero wants to ensure that the underprivileged people of the world also have access to the support systems and resources needed to live a healthy life. Referring to brutal assaults on transwomen around the world, Geena states, "People are dying. I need to do something."

Ed Gold Scholarship
As might be expected of the eldest child of two Nigerian immigrants, I possess an abiding entrepreneurial spirit and drive to succeed. I joined the New York Investment Banking Consulting team at FactSet Research Systems in September 2001 and was quickly promoted to Senior Consultant and Account Executive. I simultaneously enrolled in an evening statistics classes at NYU and joined Weichert Realtors as a real estate agent. These varied commitments forced me to learn how to multitask and set priorities. I fell in love with real estate and enrolled in the graduate program at Cornell.

The real estate program brought opportunities to travel to and study emerging real estate markets in Nigeria and China. During this time, I earned the title of second runner-up in the Miss Nigeria in America Beauty Pageant. I used my platform to raise awareness about Nigerian issues in America. In 2008, I also earned…...

It is thought that the current culture takes power away from women by holding them hostage to an unachievable beauty epitome. The multi-billion dollar beauty business often relies on a strong importance on the worth of attractiveness and looks for women, because this supports a utilization centered culture in which the response for any trouble can be attained by buying goods for improving one's look (Spettigue and Henderson, 2004).
Recently that has been a movement to get away from this traditional line of thinking when it comes to beauty and ideal body image. Two examples of this can be seen in Special K. And Dove commercials. Special K. has in modern years directed at women with its Special K. Challenge. This campaign endorses substituting two daily meals with cereal and limiting snacking in order to shed up to six pounds in two weeks. The acceptance of the plan has led…...

mla

Works Cited

"Dove ads with 'real' women get attention." 2005, viewed 21 December 2010,

Harrison, Gail, Juric, Biljana and Cornwell, T. Bettina. 2009. "The Relationship of Advertising

Model Attractiveness and Body Satisfaction to Intention to Purchase an Exercise

His face is expressionless as he focuses on the heavy bar he raises and lowers. The camera then cuts to shot of the boy's room; we see the boy's arms only lifting the bench press. The camera then cuts to a shot the boy jumping rope, doing sit-ups, push-ups, and finally pull-ups. The scene ends with the boy writing down and crossing off day 473 on a very long chart. The camera shows a side-profile shot of the boy looking blankly at the chart, and then re-focuses to capture the boy's face in the mirror standing next to him, still appearing empty in his eyes. This is our introduction to Dwayne, Olive's brother, and his quest to fulfilling his dream of joining the Air Force and never having to deal with his dysfunctional family again.
The fourth character journey is embarked upon when a door then closes forcefully and a…...

mla

Works Cited

Bartlett, Myke. "Sex Sells: Child Sexualization and the Media." Screen Education; Spring. Issue 51 (2008): 106-111. Print.

Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. London: Longman Publishing. 2010. Print.

Dargis, Manohla. " 'Little Miss Sunshine': You're Either on the Family Bus, or You're Off." New York Times, 26 July 2006. Web. 3 March 2010.

Finamore, Dora. "Little Miss Sunshine and Positive Psychology as a Vehicle for Positive Change in Adolescent Depression." Popular Culture in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Play-Based Interventions. Ed. Lawrence C. Rubin. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008. 123-140. Print.

He has finally accepted himself and his family, and with this empowerment he needs to let go of those pipe dreams which only made the family so dysfunctional in the first place.
Future

If they continue to accept and support each other, I see a bright future for the family. Throughout the movie, "the family pulls together in facing life's challenges head on and in the moment" (ubin, 2009, p 131). The devotion to being authentic empowers the children, and the adults, allowing them to feel comfortable in their own skin. In five to ten years, this family will only continue to grow stronger as they support each other and allow one another to be as weird as they want to be. In this model the children will have less to worry about as they grow up in a world that would otherwise ostracize them. Olive's future looks especially bright because…...

mla

References

Herrin, Marcia & Matsumoto, Nancy. (2011). Mealtime parenting tips from Little Miss Sunshine. Psychology Today. Web.  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/eating-disorders-news/201106/mealtime-parenting-tips-little-miss-sunshine-0 

Rubin, Lawrence C. (2009). Popular Culture in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Play-Based Interventions. Springer Publishing Company.

Ylinen, Alice. (2010). Everyone just pretend to be normal: A sociological analysis of Little Miss Sunshine. Orebro University. Web.  http://academia.edu/1934223/_Everyone_Just_Pretend_to_be_Normal_A_Sociological_Analysis_of_Little_Miss_Sunshine