Beauty Games: A Review of Beauty Queens and Modelland (and why YA Novels appeal)

Tyra Banks has invented her own version of Hunger Games. No, not her competitive reality TV show America's Next Top Model, but Modelland, her debut novel about a mythical world where girls compete to become supermodels with superpowers.

Modelland, which came out in September, is pure Banks. It's a bit overblown and overly long, with lots of invented model-ly words.  But, it's also fun and silly. Now let's be clear, as an author Banks is no Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Hunger Games trilogy, which is a truly exceptional and riveting series for readers of all ages, and a trenchant commentary on social life, inequality, competition, and competitive reality television.  But Modelland, which clearly has echos of the war games involved in Collins' work, is subversive in its own way. In Modelland (both the physical setting and the novel), girls are the stars and boys are the accessories.  There is definitely an element of girl power, even though looks still matter. And it's not always the most beautiful girl who is the star either (though, of course, it doesn't hurt). There is a focus on female careers, and not leaving for a man; when a girl does leave for a member of the opposite sex it doesn't go so well. In addition to this message of female empowerment Banks slips in more mundane beauty lessons. For instance, through one terrifying challenge the girls learn why they shouldn't share make-up products or buy knock-off products/accessories. Like I said, a bit silly, though with a somewhat useful message.

Award-winning Young Adult author Libba Bray's latest, Beauty Queens, is also a bit silly-- but, like Banks, she promotes a message of subversive girl power even as she talks about beauty.

In Beauty Queens all the contestants in a teen beauty pageant go down in a plane crash on an island.  Only a few survive and those who do have to continue fighting for survival (so, again, a bit of a Hunger Games element)... While still preparing for a possible beauty pageant. Through the experience the girls, and the reader, learn that girls can be innovative and strong, while still wanting to look good and be true to themselves.  There are some jokes and observations about child beauty pageants (my favorite is when contestant/survivor Tiara, who started doing pageants at two weeks old, says she won Grand Supreme and one of the non-traditional state pageant queens responds by asking, "Do you want fries with that?" [page 45]) and competition among girls (“Compete is a rather ugly word, isn’t it?” [page 2]) which give the book a sarcastic edge that some teen readers in particular will appreciate.

It may surprise you that I read and write about so many Young Adult (YA) novels on this blog (for example, these dance novels and Wolitzer's new book on Scrabble tournaments).  But it shouldn't.  The topics covered in YA (especially those about topics I study, like organized sports and kids' activities, dance, beauty pageants, etc.) and the sense of immediacy in the stories make them interesting reads.  A recent piece in The Boston Globe by Meredith Goldstein helps explain why so many recent YA books (think Twilight, which I did read, but just couldn't get into the series itself) have had crossover appeal.

In any case, while Modelland and Beauty Queens are fun reads, if you're going to try out a YA novel for the first time, I definitely recommend the Hunger Games trilogy-- especially before the movies come out.  And if you're still hooked, try Bray's or Banks' take on what I call the "beauty games."

Shrinking and Pinking: Cheering on female athletic heroes

During this time of year, we know that heroes are among us and "ordinary" people do extraordinary things (like "layaway angels"). Sports figures tend to be inspiring heroes to many throughout the hero, whether that adoration is deserved or not. One female athlete who definitely does deserve to be called a hero-- for her performance both on and off the athletic stage-- is world champion sk- jumper Lindsey Van.  As I wrote about back in April, Van donated bone marrow to a man she has never met. When asked recently to donate again, to the same man, Van didn't hesitate (even as the donation process impacted her training for the World Cup season).

Van's long-held supremacy in ski-jumping may be coming to a close, as an up-and-coming American ten years her junior just won the first women's World Cup ski-jumping event. Sarah Hendrickson, at only 17, also qualifies as a Pint-Sized Phenom.

It will be exciting to watch both Van and Hendrickson battle it out in the years leading up to 2014 Olympics in Sochi, the first year women's ski-jumping will be included in the Olympics (Van has previously sued to get it included, so I hope she will be able to compete in a few years)!

Another exciting teen phenom is Kelly Cobb, a freshman soccer player at Duke. Cobb has emerged as a soccer star, albeit from an unlikely place: Alaska.  A recent profile in The New York Times included some great tidbits-- like the horrible sunburn she got in NC because she's not used to playing outside, the time a moose interrupted her team's soccer game by standing in front of the goal, and an encounter with a black bear during an icy run.  I have a feeling we'll be hearing much more from Cobb in the next decade or so.

While we all might cheer Cobb, Hendrickson, and Van from our couches, another group of women (some of whom definitely qualify as athletes) often cheer from the sidelines. Cheerleaders remain popular companions to male team sports like basketball and football.  With the rise of competitive cheer many are considered athletes in their own rights.  And now an organization wants to show you that they are brainy as well. "Science cheerleaders" are a group of current and former NFL and NBA cheerleaders who also hold science degrees and/or jobs in science.  Check out their website to see how they promote science education through sports and cheer. I think it sounds like a neat organization that can positively impact young girls in a number of ways.

As cheerleading continues to evolve in interesting ways it's important to remember that barriers to participation by sex still exist in cheer, and in other sports.  A cheer team in Michigan was recently disqualified from a statewide competition for having male cheerleaders. In this case having boys on the team isn't allowed, even though there isn't an option for males who want to participate.   This is the opposite of how things work in Massachusetts (funny enough, MA is now my home state, though MI is where I grew up), as I've written about before. Boys are allowed to play on girls' field hockey teams and swim teams, which is sometimes met with resistance.

What do you think? Should girls be able to play on boys' teams (as often happens in wrestling, for example), and vice versa, when similar opportunities aren't available for both sexes?

Youth pageants thrive, 15 years after JonBenét Ramsey's death (Op-Ed published in The Denver Post)

CLICK HER TO READ THIS AT THE DENVER POST! What did Santa bring the little girl in your life? A Barbie or an American Girl​ doll? Perhaps it was a gift certificate for a manicure or a facial?

Don't be surprised if it was the latter, as girls young as 6 are making appointments at salons across the country for chemical hair straighteners, eyebrow tweezing and pedicures.

Fifteen years ago, the 6-year-old girl who helped start this beauty craze never got to open her gifts from Santa. On the morning of Dec. 25, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey​ awoke in their Boulder home to find their daughter, JonBenét, missing. A few hours later, they found her, murdered, in their basement.

The ensuing media coverage helped propagate the child beauty pageant industry, along with a beauty culture increasingly directed at younger and younger girls. JonBenét Ramsey's short life continues to rivet, as her murder remains unsolved. Her death was a harbinger of today's media-saturated girlhood focused on princesses, competition and the pursuit of beauty.

In the years immediately following JonBenét's death, the child beauty pageant industry, which I have studied since 2001, took a serious financial hit as thousands began to avoid participating in the now publicly tainted activity.

But now, 15 years later (and somewhat perversely), child beauty pageants are a bigger business than ever, and the industry has profited from the spotlight provided by the murder. Without JonBenét, there would be no "Toddlers & Tiaras​" — and no scandals to report on the cover of People or families to feature on ET or TMZ. Hundreds of small, local pageants have sprung up across the country since JonBenét participated in them.

Beauty pageants had long been part of the culture of JonBenét's family, as they are for many women from the South. JonBenét's mother, Patsy (nee Paugh), was Miss West Virginia in 1977. Patsy competed in the Miss America pageant, winning a non-finalist talent award.

In their 2001 book on JonBenét's life and death, "The Death of Innocence," John and Patsy Ramsey wrote that after seeing her mother judge a beauty pageant, JonBenét declared that she wanted to be a beauty queen as well. Patsy was delighted. She had loved her experiences in pageantry and always felt that if she had started participating in pageants when she was younger, she could have made the top 10 at Miss America, or maybe won the whole shebang.

Over the next two years, with the help of her sister, Pamela (also Miss West Virginia, in 1980), Patsy enrolled JonBenét in a total of nine child beauty pageants in Colorado, Georgia and Michigan.

JonBenét, with her sequined costumes and baby's breath hair adornments, showed little girls that modern princess-hood was possible, before these girls could take their dolls to the hair salon (at the first American Girl store, which opened in Chicago in 1998) or look like their favorite Disney princess, with the assistance of special beauticians (Disney started marketing princesses to young girls in 2000).

Patsy Ramsey, who died from ovarian cancer in 2006, also served as a role model for some mothers. In many ways she seemed to be a throwback to the stage mothers of the past, like Shirley Temple​'s mother, who exhorted her daughter to "sparkle, sparkle, sparkle" before each take. But in other ways, in raising her daughter to compete to win, she was a new type of mother — an early version of a Tiger Mother​, albeit a bedazzled one. She wanted to give her daughter a competitive head start in a world focused on beauty — a world that she thought would bring success, achievement and glory.

Fifteen years after Patsy Ramsey's only daughter was found dead in her home, little girls will spend the afternoon playing with their new kiddie make-up kits and strutting down homemade, makeshift runways in new sequined mini-skirts. They'll watch DVDs featuring their favorite Disney princesses, or even catch a repeat of one of the faux princesses on "Toddlers & Tiaras."

American girlhood may have been sashaying toward unreasonable competitive beauty ideals before JonBenét's murder. But ultimately her death and media exposure hastened the explosion of the girly glitter bomb in the early 21st century.

My Dress Made from Magic: Remembering Priscilla of Boston

I was a Priscilla bride. As you may know Priscilla of Boston, which has been producing gorgeous wedding dresses for 65 years, will close forever next week on December 31st.  The news was announced in August, and ever since then I've been thinking about honoring my Priscilla experience on my blog.  I thought the best way to do this was to share an email I wrote to friends right after I bought my wedding dress from Priscilla's in January 2010. Here it is:

You know the show Say Yes to the Dress? Well, even if you don't, you'll know how people say, "When I put on my wedding dress I just knew it was for me... I cried..."

I never had that.

In fact, I thought those people who did were a little titched. The only reaction I worried about having was Carrie's in Sex and the City when she is supposed to marry Aiden, has a panic attack in her wedding dress, and Miranda has to rip her out of it.

I bought a dress, for super cheap, nine months before my wedding date mainly to halt a sort of sad and depressing shopping experience. Don’t get me wrong, shopping is normally my thing, but I found wedding dress shopping with dresses that don’t actually fit you very confusing and not so fun. I never loved that other dress, but I figured I would only wear it for a few hours.

Lately, I'd been feeling bad about that dress for a few reasons (namely that it will live on forever in the form of pictures and, since I am walking by myself down the long aisle at Memorial Church, I was worried I wouldn't "stand out" enough all by my lonesome).  So, whenever I read a bridal magazine, I would check out the dress pics, only oh-so-casually.  But nothing tickled  my fancy, so I let it go.

Until, it did. And then I fell hard. Very hard. It was a new dress from Priscilla of Boston. So new it wasn’t even on their website yet. I saw it advertised in one magazine, then two, then three. By the third time I saw it, I cried. No joke, I cried (granted I was a little emotional while planning a wedding, but still!). John knew I didn't feel great in my dress and he saw me get so worked up, so we talked about it on Sunday and he convinced me I should at least try it on, otherwise, I would always wonder.  He told me, "You deserve to feel beautiful on our wedding day, so if you really want it, we will find a way to make it happen." You see, I knew my (suddenly) dream dress would not be cheap. But the man of my dreams is totally priceless, clearly.

I found the dress on the Internet. I stared at it. I refreshed. It was like a boy I had a crush on-- I kept looking at the picture. And every time I did, my hardened little bridal heart skipped a beat.

So I called the store in Boston on Boylston Street. They said they had it in. They promised me they wouldn't tempt me with the forbidden fruit (which I had already named, YES I NAMED MY DRESS, "Hilary Grace") unless they could guarantee it would be in for May 15th. I made an appointment for the next morning at 11 am. I fretted and giddily refreshed some more and hoped it would transform me into a beautiful bride.

I woke up with knots in my stomach. As I approached the store, I saw it in the window. My eyes teared. I'm not kidding! I got up there and a sweet bridal consultant got me in the dress. I cried. A lot. She had to bring me tissues. Embarrassing! They brought people out-- no one had seen the dress on before! I told them I felt like a bride for the first time.

In short, I bought my dress, which I say is made from magic. It is made from magic because it makes me feel beautiful, and pretty, and reminds me that I am marrying the best guy in the world for me. I told John I never wanted to take the dress off, that I would even clean the house it in. He told me I couldn't clean the house in it, because we are selling it after the wedding, especially since demand will be high for this new-ish design. He's still John, the practical economist, and I love him for that.

On my wedding day, May 15, 2010, I still felt like the dress made me magical.  Here's a shot of me clearly seeing myself transform into a bride:

I don't think I will ever feel that beautiful again!

Postscript: I did sell the dress, within a few months of our wedding. While I loved it, I knew I would never wear it again (not even to clean the house in) and I honestly wanted to pass on some good bridal karma. Plus, John would have nagged me... I don't regret selling the dress at all, though I saved my veil in case anyone from the next generation wants to wear it someday.

[For more pictures from our wedding day, if you're interested, our wedding was featured on Weddingbee, the *only* bridal website I read while wedding planning. Love! Click here to see us as part of their "Real Wedding" series. Also, I can't recommend our photographer, Michael O'Bryon highly enough!]

"Princess means that you' re a loser!": Recent beauty pageant portrayals on TV (UPDATED to include dance competitions)

Princess means that you're a loser! A lot of feminists might agree with this sentiment-- especially with the recent release of Disney's newest princess targeted at the preschool set, Sofia the First.

But it was a child beauty pageant mom who uttered this line during the continuing fourth season of TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras, which returned on December 7th.

The format is similar (introduce moms and kids at home, mock their hometowns, cover their pageant preparations, expose some sort of hijinks, show them arriving at pageant, getting ready, some pageant drama, and crowning) as are many of the themes ("beauty hurts," girls wanting to be Miss America, comparisons to dog shows, likening pageants to a drug/addiction). As I've said before I think many moms on this show are upping the crazy ante to get more screen time, and it seems that Michelle Leonardo, the reigning Miss New Jersey USA (herself a former child beauty pageant queen) agrees with me.

And, clearly, we have some new crazy to process. In the December 14th episode (set in the Midwest) it's princess meltdown mom, Kelly, who compares pageants to an addiction. Click below to see her expletive-laced explosion during crowning after she thinks her daughter didn't "pull" for a higher title.

In addition to showing this intense hissy fit, the new season has also brought us Riley, Bob, and Bob's rat tail in another episode (focused on a "Glitzmas" pageant in the Northeast).  Bob and Riley's parents both love drag shows and cite drag queens as an inspiration in their children's pageant preparations.  While there are clearly some similarities between drag and child beauty pageants, such an explicit connection is rare.

I also see a lot of similarities between child beauty pageants and Gypsy/Irish Traveller clothes and customs (which I suppose have their own similarities with drag), as I've written about before. While TLC covers both subcultures, I've never seen them make an explicit connection between the two.  If you're interested in more Gypsy/Traveller dresses check out the new TLC Gypsy Christmas Special, which premiered this week; the ones shown on wedding guests and at the First Communion in Ireland are especially noteworthy.

TLC isn't the only network giving us recent portrayals of child beauty pageants. On December 11th CBS' CSI: Miami was about a murder at a child beauty pageant.  The episode, "Crowned," had the following program description: "The CSIs expose the seedy underbelly of children's beauty pageants when a contestant's mom is murdered."  While the episode used the proper lingo for pageant terms, it did have the wrong look overall (for instance, the pageant was held outside and many of the dresses shown were outdated pageant styles).  It also featured common complaints about child beauty pageants-- that kids should just be kids, that they shouldn't look like dolls, that it puts them on display, etc.  While the fictional murder case was the opposite of the JonBenet Ramsey murder, since it was the mother who died, that didn't stop the show writers from introducing a sexual molestation angle.

I actually believe that the constant attempts to link child beauty pageants to pedophilia are a bit unfair. I'm not trying to defend pageants and say that they don't in fact place girls in sometimes sexual situations, because I think they do.  But the reality is that there has never been a reported case of child molestation because of child beauty pageants-- yet media portrayals consistently draw this link (another recent TV example: On September 29th of this year an episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, called "Frank Reynolds' Little Beauties," features a molester who uses child pageants to find young girls to ogle).

Yes, there was evidence that JonBenet was molested, but it has never been proven that she died because of the pageants connection.  And, sure, we don't know for sure that young girls haven't been abused because of child beauty pageants-- it just may never have been reported.  There have been instances where pictures of pageant girls have appeared on websites that they shouldn't have, but this is true of Facebook pictures as well.  Given all the recent sexual abuse scandals in youth activities (and specifically girls in gymnastics), which I've written about here, it strikes me as odd that we don't pay more attention to activities where we know girls have been abused.  Having been to so many different children's competitive events for research purposes, I can say that child beauty pageants are far more careful about who is allowed around these young girls than any other activity.  They really aren't open to the public and males are kept away from girls.  I understand why pageants are an easy target, but I wish the media would sometimes pay more attention to where we know the bad guys really are.

It's also true that pageants can help some girls.  I have long been a fan of the MTV series Made. Becoming a pageant queen is a pretty common goal on this show and two new episodes (on 12/3 and 12/12) focused on seventeen-year-old girls training to compete in beauty pageants in New England and in Missouri. Both featured great, supportive, flamboyant, male coaches and spirited and well-spoken teenage girls.  While neither "won" the top title, both did well and learned a lot. You can watch one of the episodes in full here.  I love how both girls became role models in their own ways, too (unlike Miss USA 2010 Rima Fakih, recently arrested for drunk driving).

In spite of some flaws I know I'll keep watching Toddlers & Tiaras, Made, and any other pageant shows.  And I will for sure be watching the Miss America pageant, live on ABC on Saturday, January 14th-- even if I don't agree with most of their picks for judges this year!  I'll also be keeping a close eye on what happens with former Miss America Rebecca King's daughter, Diana Dreman, Miss Colorado (especially as I will likely be watching with my newborn son by then... at least I hope I will).

ETA: On the night I posted this a new episode of TNT's Rizzoli & Isles aired. Its title? "Don't Stop Dancing, Girl." The episode was about a murdered dance mom, who stumbles on stage during a routine with a pair of scissors sticking out of her neck.  The first half of the episode (recapped here), focuses on "Dance Moms"-like antics (moms screaming at one another, a security guard in the dance studio waiting area to monitor the moms, a mean teacher who yells, etc.).  Of course, as it turns out, the murder has *nothing* to do with dance competitions and instead involves a drug-trafficking ex-husband and witness protection.

Despite this the episode did produce some funny/interesting quips-- especially linking child beauty pageants and dance competitions, along with other competitive kids' activities.  First example: "It's like Little League. With Sequins." Another described the competition as a "beauty pageant with rhythm."  In defense of dancers , Rizzoli comments that dancers are athletes in costumes who practice 40 hours per week; she compared them to figure skaters.

Probably the most accurate and interesting thing to me in the episode was the focus on the girls' birth certificate, which a dance mom claimed was forged.  This ultra-competitive mom claimed that the dead mom was trying to help her daughter win against younger competitors.  As it turns out, the birth certificate was faked to help hide her from her dangerous dad. But parents manipulating kids' ages to give them an advantage against younger competitors has actually happened (most famous case is Danny Almonte), and it is a frequent allegation in all kids' competitive activities.

I wonder which show will next tackle beauty pageants and dance competitions? I could see Rizzoli & Isles doing on episode on Irish Dancing, given its Boston setting.