Criticism
Parents of children are sometimes criticized for entering their children in pageants. For instance, Shelby Colene Pannell, a sociologist, questions why parents would subject their children to gender socialization because pageants are the perfect setting for the” traditional” type of femininity. These young girls are being exposed to things such as makeup and spray tans at a very young age, making these families a target for criticism.
Families on TLC’s hit television series Toddlers & Tiaras are especially criticized for negatively influencing their children that their physical appearance will score them attention and prizes. The show first aired in 2009 and follows the child participants and their parents as they prepare for the upcoming beauty pageant of the weekend. The show is non-narrated to avoid showing opinion and has sparked heavy controversy in the last few years, due to actions including allowing a child to smoke a fake cigarette during the talent portion of the competition, forcing a child to wear fake breasts, a parent who allowed her child to dress like a prostitute in the “outfit of choice” category, feeding a child “pageant crack,” a mixture of sugar and high-calorie sweeteners to provide the necessary energy needed to perform well on the runway, and waxing/threading a child’s facial and body hair to give them a glowing appearance on stage.
Read more about this topic: Child Beauty Pageant
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)