On Wednesday Hayley Galloway, the returning Miss Teen Great Britain, will hand over her crown to a new winner. At eighteen years old, she’s now been on the pageant circuit for three years, since she first entered Miss West Lothian. Unlike the parents of many young women, feminists, and academics who have studied the effects of beauty pageants on children, Galloway says she believes that pageants are not the problem when it comes to low self-esteem in girls, but rather part of the solution.
To many it will sound counter-intuitive, but the young beauty pageant veteran claims: “People see things like Miss Congeniality or the American reality TV show Toddlers And Tiaras. They see the nastiness. But in my experience, it doesn’t force you to be more pretty, it doesn’t make you do those things. It actually helps you to be you. It’s the answer; not the negative side of it.”
Campaigners for children's rights worry that parents are pushing their daughters into a culture which they are unable to consent to because of their age, and into an industry which is low on regulation. And psychological research shows that taking part in pageants has a detrimental effect on the mental health of children.
However, far from having made Galloway more anxious about her appearance, the world of beauty pageants, she insists, has increased her confidence. “I find that doing pageants made me accept how I look. Before I was quite self conscious. As I’ve gone through the world of pageants I’ve sort of learned to accept my body.”
We live in a time when it seems children are beset with anxiety about their bodies at ever younger ages. The 2012 All Party Parliamentary Group report on body image found five year old girls worry about their looks; and that appearance is the greatest cause of bullying. Young boys, too, are anxious about getting fat. A recent UK study into eating disorders found that self-esteem problems at the age of eight were significant predictors for problems in teenage years. Meanwhile industries revolving around the beautification of the young, and some say the “hypersexualisation” of the young, are expanding.
This is the first year that Miss Teen Great Britain has had a 'Little Miss' category for 11-13 year olds. Increasingly these lower age groups are being catered for in the growing teen beauty pageant industry. Only a decade ago it was barely possible to find a child beauty pageant in the UK – they were almost an alien concept - but now there are at least 25 major titles, as well as innumerable local pageants, and a host of training courses for children, magazines and listing sites. Of course, the 'teen' market is not the only section of the pageant industry that is growing. There are also contests for transgender people, for plus-size women, for over fifties, for young men, for boys, for 'Yummy Mummies'.
That said, the UK is far from suffering an American-style epidemic of bikini-wearing, spray-tanned pre-teens a la the much reviled show Toddlers And Tiaras. In the reality show, one mother was criticized for padding her daughter's chest to resemble Dolly Parton's and another was criticized for asking her daughter to smoke fake cigarettes on stage.
Almost everyone involved with the UK pageant industry says that on this side of the Atlantic at least there is not a culture of fake tans, perma-white teeth, pushy mums and early sexualisation. Angel Dairo, who runs the Miss Little Scotland event, told the Sunday Herald at the time of their first event that what was happening was not an “American-style beauty pageant". She added: "It's just about inner beauty. It's about their confidence, poise. They won't be wearing fake tan."
It’s a very different scene from the one the organizer of Miss Teen Great Britain, Holly Ikin, entered back when she participated in her first pageant at age 18. She recalls that there were no teen competitions when she was young. As a girl she sat every year and watched Miss World with her mum, and they joked that she had been born in the wrong time, a decade too late, because pageants had fallen out of fashion since the 70s and 80s.
Miss World was once one of the most watched TV shows in the UK but then it all started to decline, she says, because of "the feminists and their views on the competitions”.
She believes there is a resurgence now for beauty pageants, however. “Things come in and out of fashion. But they are rising in popularity. I really do believe that people are realizing the positives of pageantry.”
She is also keen to point out that the events she organizes are a world away from Toddlers And Tiaras. “When people come along they see that it’s about fun and celebrating the girls. With Miss Teen Great Britain 50% of the scoring is based on the interview. We focus on that rather than it being a high pressure fashion show where they’ve got fake teeth or something like that. We don’t do the younger contestants either. We don’t go under the age of 11.”
Both Ikin and Galloway claim any girl, regardless of background, shape or size, could enter the Miss Teen Britain. As Galloway points out: “You can be the most beautiful girl in the world but if you aren’t beautiful inside as well, then that doesn’t shine through… Of course you want to look pretty. Everybody wants to be glamorous and everybody feels so much better about themselves when you’ve got amazing hair and make-up. And not every day can you be able to dress up in prom dresses, pageant dresses.”
That said, Galloway does believe that girls in our society do experience a great deal of pressure to look a particular way. “I don’t think that comes from pageants or the media, though,” she says. “I think, from my experience at school, the real problem is other girls, it’s the bullying side of things. Because you want to fit in with the popular people and be the way they are. And if you’re not how they are then you get picked on for being different.”.
Despite the protestations of the women who organise teen beauty pageants, campaigners remain concerned about the proliferation of contests based on what girls and young women look like. Claude Knights of the anti-bullying charity Kidscape says all the differing forms of pageants exist on a 'continuum'. At the extreme end of which is “the spray tan, the false eyelashes, the false nails, the make-up, the ball-gowns, the sexualized clothing”, and at the milder end are competitions like Miss Teen Britain and Miss Little Scotland. In America and the UK there are, in fact, two quite different categories of pageant. The former describes itself as Glitz, the latter as “natural”.
For Knights though, however “natural” the children are encouraged to be, there is a problem with pageants for the very young, like Mini Little Miss Scotland, which she has criticized in the past. The pageant now caters for children as young as just six months old. "I would still be concerned that very young children can enter. There is no way you can really give informed consent at that age." There is also the problem that pageants are an unregulated industry.
However, for those in the pageant industry the words “self esteem” and “empowerment” are something of a mantra. Galloway points out that during the contest Ikin delivers a useful seminar that “teaches girls how to be themselves and comfortable in their own skin”. Galloway used to be, she says, “a bit of a tomboy”, under confident about her appearance and uncomfortable because she was so tall.
Most pageant parents, meanwhile, insist they are far from pushy. Joda Quigley, herself a keen competitor in Tough Mudder events, is mother to the last two winners of Miss Little Scotland: Tara Quigley, age eleven, and Tamzen Quigley, age nine. She says that it was the girls who wanted to take part, and that she has set a limit of one pageant per year.
Like many involved in pageants, she believes these beauty contests are less about looks and “more about public speaking” and self presentation”. In the UK, she points out, they are predominantly “natural” - lacking the tacky and sinister glamour of underage children made up to look like adult women. “It’s not like you see in Toddlers And Tiaras where they’re all wearing false hair and caked up in fake tan and stuff like that. It’s not like that at all. It’s more about natural beauty and confidence.”
She has sat on judging panels at pageants in the last year and “the beauty aspect isn’t very important”, she claims. “It’s more,” she adds, “the effort they put into their outfits, the creative element. Certainly there’s no mark for 'have they got the whitest teeth' or the slimmest waist.”
So, regardless of what all the pageant leaders and parents say - do these events really help enhance a child's self esteem? Research suggests that this is not the case. A study by Anna Wonderlich, Diann Ackard and Judith Henderson revealed that children and young adults who participated in beauty pageants had a higher rate of disordered eating, body dissatisfaction and self-esteem issues than their peers. They also found those who participated in pageant tended to be slender according to their BMI, yet frequently thought they were large.
Given this, it seems pageants really are not “the answer” when it comes to the self-esteem issues confronting young women today. So if beauty pageants are not the answer, then are they the problem? For Joda Quigley the answers is easy - even if many other parents, academics and researchers, and young feminist women, would disagree with her.
“Pageants aren’t to blame," she says. "I think girls and women and men and boys are self conscious anyway. I don’t think it makes them any more conscious about the way they look. There are already huge pressures on us all to look and act in certain ways to be accepted.”
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