I found yet another creepy clip of little kids…looking creepy. Basically what I wonder is how these kids look so much older. I mean, I get that they’re wearing pounds and pounds of make up. And they all look so normal and healthy and regular little girl under it all. Is it just that we associate make up with looking older and therefore we see them as older…or what? Because by older folks, make up is used to try to preserve a more youthful complexion, no? (Smoothed out skin, bright lips, etc.) What gives here?
I agree. It’s like a cross between Barbie dolls and those “real baby” dolls, with the features of the baby dolls and the painted on, airbrush look of the Barbie makeup. It’s creepy because nobody looks like that without piling on tons of makeup. They’re almost like fierce little drag queens in comparison to their non-makeup personas, which are all cute little girls.
Yeah…they do look very plasticky. Maybe I’m just thinking of when JonBenet Ramsey died and people were saying how awful it was that she was made to look so much older than she was when she was really just a six year old kid…back then the emphasis definitely was that she was being made up to look way older/sexualized. But I guess also the way she dressed and so forth had a lot to do with it.
I think another reason they look plasticky, and older, is because they have been trained to pose like professional models. They strike these poses and walk in ways that no actual child ever would. So they look weird and pseudo-adultish to us.
I ran across a special on this whatever it is (I was going to say phenomenon, but I don’t think that’s quite right) not too long ago on like Discovery Channel or something. Now, I had seen all the Jon Benet-Ramsey pictures so I was prepared for the plastic version of little girls pretending to be runway models, but this special put the fear of Og in me.
First of all, the parents all ranged from slightly off-kilter to fucking deranged. Drilling and grilling these children to do something that was so unnatural. It bordered on abuse.
But then the juxtaposition of seeing these normal little girls in the “let’s look at home life” section compared to how they were trolloped up for the pageants. I swear, I couldn’t recognize them.
But the one thing that stuck out in my mind the most, and I don’t know why … do you know that it’s de rigueur for these pageant kids to wear fake teeth? Really. That have these bits or something that they shove in their mouths, clamping over their real teeth, so that they all look perfect, and white and far beyond their years.
It was hella-creepy, I’m telling you.
I kept on thinking, why would anybody jam Tammy Fay’s head on a little kid like that?
Yeah, in the youtube clip I thought I saw a mom putting…something in her daughter’s mouth…and I thought, “Whoa, are those faux teeth?” Yuck. They all look so normal and cute when they’re not tarted up like that.
I agree with this completely. The poses and mannerisms they use are much more practiced, coy and seductive than you’d see on any one of their non-modeling peers. Most little girls that age haven’t yet mastered or begun to master their body language and facial expressions to the degree the mini-queens have.
Well, I think a part of this has to do with the fact that at least a part of standard make-up application is intended to simulate sexual signals. I’m thinking specifically of lipstick and blush – when a woman is aroused, her heart beats faster and she gets flushed. If she’s a shy flirt she may even blush. Her lips grow redder and so do her cheeks. By painting it on with make-up, adult women use it as a subtle “sexual readiness” signal (i.e. “I’m already turned on”), which men, naturally, find arousing.
Plus smokey eye shadow is not found in nature, so we’ve been culturally socialized to see it as “sexy.”
Put sexual signals on a six-year-old, and you get “eeeeewwwwww. CREEPY.”
That #1 item on my list of what is wrong with this country that makes me go livid is the sexualization of children. Little girls in tight clothes and makeup is just plain evil. Those mothers should be condemned as unfit and the children should be taken away from them.
I think these are scary and creepy but I think I can explain the idea behind the fake teeth…
I have a 6 year old, who has lost several teeth so far. She’s got some gaping holes in there, and in other spots a couple of adult teeth that are much larger than her little baby teeth. Plus her teeth are all spread out and oddly spaced, ready for more to fall out. It looks weird even to me and I’m her mom and I know it is healthy and on schedule.
The fake teeth cover up these natural “imperfections”, just as the makeup does. I wouldn’t do it to my kid, but that is why the fake teeth are used.
Yeah, I guess the whole thing just bothers me. Like, the make up for these so called imperfections. I mean, you’re six and you’re already being reminded of a million “flaws”–that’s got to be damaging to one’s self esteem.
Not from me you ain’t. Ask yourself how many pedophines use the film clips of JonBenet on youtube as masturbation aids. Perfectly legal; absolutely disgusting.
My 6 year old’s teeth are the same way, and I don’t think it looks weird at all. It just makes him look exactly like what he is–a beautiful, sweet, adorable 6 year old. The fact that these people consider this an imperfection worth covering is just beyond messed up. Jeez, it’s like complaining that your 6 year old is short! Anyway, thanks for the explanation.
