The 6 Most Horrifying Child's Beauty Pageant Contestants
If you've never seen Toddlers & Tiaras, your soul is less tainted than those of people who have. It's a program on TLC about parents who hate their own offspring and make them perform like deranged mascara-ravaged monkeys on stages with similarly soiled children in evening wear and sequined vomit cloaks so that the audience can try to discern who is the most soulless and abominable in any given episode from among a malevolent circus of bestial subhumans who pretend to be supporting their child's hobby but are generally exploiting them for shallow and pathetically crass purposes. It's a joy to behold.
While the idea of a beauty pageant for children is objectionable in and of itself, things can actually get worse. How much worse? Oh man, look!
Hooker Kid
As a people, we have decided that we don't want children to be exposed to certain things -- bullies, the Saw movie franchise, the music of 2 Live Crew, and maybe dressing up like an honest-to-goodness, $20 for a blow job prostitute. Now, let me say right off, I do not condemn prostitution; it's probably one of the most honest business transactions in the world. But dressing a child up like a prostitute is a whole different ballgame (the game is called Mom's a Dipshit).
In this case, a 3-year-old girl featured on an episode of Toddlers & Tiaras & Terrible, Brain Dead Fuckstick Parents was released on stage to a cheering crowd of like-minded mouth breathers as she danced to the song "Pretty Woman" dressed just like the pretty woman herself, Julia Roberts, as seen in the movie of the same name in which she played someone who polished Richard Gere's ball sack in exchange for nice dinners and some flash money. Remember when he buys her that necklace and he closes the box as she reaches for it and she busts out in boisterous laughter? That necklace was a gift for anal.
"I'm ... earning ... matching earrings!"
Sure, it's just a movie, but it's a movie about a whore. Even if she has a heart of gold and all her own teeth, she is someone who porks strangers for cash, and that's the kind of thing your kid should wait to experience, at least until she can properly pronounce her Rs so the word comes out as "whore" instead of "ho-wah."
After the non-insane world erupted in an uproar over this, the little girl's mom was apologetic and promised to use more sense when making decisions about her child from then on. Just kidding -- of course that never happened. Instead, her mom is proud of her choice and all the media attention it garnered for her li'l victim because, as you'll notice, most if not all of these parents seem functionally incapable of actually caring for their children, as opposed to using and exploiting them for whatever it is they get from competing in pageants, whether it be money or notoriety or a chance to be mocked mercilessly by online comedians.
Fake Boobs and Ass
When dressing your child as a hooker doesn't go far enough toward needlessly sexualizing her, you can always try to compensate for her lack of having reached puberty yet by giving her fake breasts and a fake ass. This of course brings to mind the original name of the show, Toddlers & Tiaras & Tits.
In this case, the little girl in question was 4 years old, and her mom, as deluded as all the other mothers who do this pageant stuff, thought it would be an awesome idea to dress her daughter like Dolly Parton. Incidentally, a Dolly Parton costume is always a blonde wig and D cups, that's about it.
Atta girl, you're halfway there!
This story gets special attention for hilarious irony, in that, while defending putting the girl in pageants, Little Boobula's grandma pointed out that the money they win can go toward expensive schooling. I can't imagine that tuition at clown college is really so pricey that simply putting a bit of your salary in savings week to week wouldn't cover it, but what do I know? Maybe it's DeVry's Clown College and tuition hits four digits.
To put the whole issue into perspective, the mom reasoned that people are going to get a bug up their ass about anything. For instance, if your child is in gymnastics, she has to have her hair and makeup done too, so what's the difference? At this point, not a single person jumped into frame and said "Tits! You gave your toddler fake tits and a fat ass, you great simian oaf!"
Tooth Bleaching
It's all fine and good to alter your kid's appearance with strap-on dildos and hoof hands and whatever other abusive thing you can think of, but all of that comes off at the end of the day. The kind of thing that stays around in the long term requires chemicals and discomfort, because children have no business not being treated like jeans from the 1980s.
As you can see, Mama Snaggletooth is pretty convinced that this is necessary and OK to do to her children, despite most dentists suggesting that it's not recommended until a child's adult teeth have grown in. But a woman who does this once a week clearly knows better than professionals by the transitive powers of bug fuck nuttery.
Mom's reasoning for this is that other kids use fake teeth, like awesome porcelain grills, but those are fake and altering what God gave you, which she is against. Best to just bleach the color out of what God gave you the unnatural way, like Jesus would have if he were alive today and a heavy smoker and/or drinker of coffee.
Autistic Miss Personality
Every so often, as someone whose great aspirations in life amount to making the largest number of people possible laugh, I come across a joke that I wish was mine. Something so perfectly funny that I am envious of how it came into existence. There are some comedians who are so adept at making fun that they can do this frequently, and less frequent are the times when the world itself conspires to make something so hilarious happen that I wish I had been the creator of those circumstances. This is arguably one of the best ones ever. This is the story about how an autistic girl won a Miss Personality prize.
Filling my Australia quota for this article is Tahnee Myles, whose mother entered her in a Melbourne beauty pageant. Tahnee suffers from autism and managed to win Miss Personality at the pageant. Right here, right at this perfect moment, is where everything is wrong. Nothing that happens now will be right, but the story will keep coming. To start, Tahnee's mom pitched a royal fit upon hearing the prize her daughter had won because her daughter apparently just has a half loaf of shit for personality. In the very strictest sense, you can see what she's saying because, as an autistic child who apparently doesn't have the greatest personality, maybe she wasn't deserving of it. On the other hand, way to crap on your own kid. But then back on that first hand, of all the kids in the pageant, you picked the autistic one for a personality prize? Was that a bizarre joke? I laughed.
Knees have been slapped!
Tahnee's mom called the pageant out as a farce, because that's what it takes to make something like this a farce. The judges defended themselves by suggesting that they judge the pageant to make everyone feel good about themselves, in that way that all kids feel good about themselves when they're paraded in front of people and then awarded things based on how they look. Or, in this case, how well their brain works to make them seem personable. All things you can tell by watching a little girl in makeup dance to Lady Gaga, I guess is what I'm saying.
Sex Offender Awareness
One of the most common critiques of children's beauty pageants comes in the form of vague, ethereal threats of child predators. Pageants are fodder for sex offenders, they're pedophiliac dreams, and all manner of grossness is going to happen at each and every one. The brightest spot of researching this article was when I discovered very little evidence to support any of that. Yay for a lack of atrocity! Let's celebrate with a beer.
Now that we're done celebrating, on to the story about a child beauty pageant and a sex offender that I did find pretty easily. Don't worry, it has a funny ending. Funny like when a clown gets shot. Like you laugh a little but your heart isn't in it.
Eat lead, you jovial fuck.
During a block party, Michael Light paused to ask police officers the way to the Little Miss Fairborn beauty pageant. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for causing a bit of a ruckus riding his bike in an unsafe area, and after doing a quick background check, police discovered that Light was a convicted sex offender and not the kind of person you want showing up at your beauty pageant. Then again, most of the parents are the kind of people you don't want showing up either.
Light argued with the cops about his bike riding habits until they finally took him into custody, thus inadvertently stopping him from spreading his creepiness all the way to Little Miss Fairborn and saving the day so that this entry could end on a high note. Not too shabby.
This Monster
Sarah Burge is a British golem made from refuse and blush that collects in the traps under the sinks of prostitutes. She's chiefly known as being a proponent of plastic surgery and has spent over a quarter of a million dollars over 20 years trying to perfect her look as a disgusting trollop.
Burge was once attacked by an ex-boyfriend and disfigured, which triggered whatever mental illness she currently suffers that has convinced her that plastic surgery is the be all and end all in life. While it's sad that she had to endure that and kind of nice that she found a way to make herself feel comfortable after the fact, none of that justifies how she is now unloading her madness on her young daughter.
Nothing offensive to humanity here. Move along.
Burge first made child abuse headlines by teaching her 6-year-old daughter Poppy to pole dance back in 2011 and somehow managed to convince herself that it's no different than playing on a jungle gym. She thinks this because of her unbridled douchiness, which prohibits her from understanding what it means to sexualize a child. She values herself only insofar as how she looks and how she is perceived by others, which as an adult woman who is as shallow as a puddle means as a sex object. She is therefore unable to understand why her daughter would have any value in this world if not for her physical appearance and any sexual pleasure she could give to others. She's fucking disgusting.
In later years, Burge gifted her daughter with plastic surgery vouchers on her birthday, one year for liposuction and one year for breast augmentation. She can't use them now, because it would be unethical beyond belief for a doctor to do that to a child, but it does show how little faith her mom has in her growing up to look anything other than disgusting and, presumably, as a fat, titless wonder.
"Love you, Momma ...ugh, gettin' sweaty standin' up for so long."
Lately Burge has been threatening to bring her daughter to America to storm the pageant circuit, because one has to assume that she saw the vacuous suckholes on Toddlers & Tiaras and felt she could do much better than them at awful parenting.
For a spot of hilarity, check out her appearance on Anderson Cooper when Cooper just cut the interview short by calling her awful. She later replied by criticizing Cooper as using her for international fame and having a duty to care for minors. The irony of both of these statements killed several interns who were standing too close.
What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror, the third book in David Wong's John Dies at the End series, is available now!
