What a girl is

I’m not sure I’m cute enough to be writing this column. Hold on while I put on some lip gloss and tease out my hair. There’s no time for a pedicure, but I can at least make an appointment.

I shouldn’t be flip about this topic. I don’t feel flip. I feel hurt. I suppose we’re flip sometimes to cover up when we feel hurt.

I’m thinking about the story of the mother in California who gave her 8-year-daughter Botox so she could do better in beauty pageants. I think the reason this story has struck such a nerve in our culture is because we’re not clear on what a girl is.

“I cannot understand families who put their little girls in beauty pageants," Dixie Huefner, chair of the communications committee for Utahns for Ethical Government said on a Woman’s View. "It sends the wrong message very early. When you put makeup on a very young girl, you send an unnatural message about what a girl is.”

So, what is a girl? She’s sugar and spice and everything nice, isn’t she? That’s what my mother used to say.

“'Beauty is as beauty does, young lady.' That’s what my mother used to say," Huefner said. “People sense your inner beauty, if you deserve it. Beauty really is internal.”

But we grew up watching Miss America. I remember dreaming about walking around in ball gowns and, yes, bathing suits, except I never looked like that.

“I watched those pageants, too," said Debbie Reid, community relations director with Recovery Ways. "And now, no matter how many times I tell myself I look good, that I’m beautiful, that I’m sexy when I put on a bathing suit, all I think is that I don’t look like Miss America.”

We don’t put our little boys through this. We don’t put them in bathing suits and make them strut around on a stage to be judged by their appearance alone. We would never do that.

Why would we never do that?

Is it just that girls are different, that it’s in our natures to dress up? I remember getting into my mother’s closet putting on her high heels and pearls and getting into her lipstick, if she’d leave it out. What’s the difference between that and Toddlers in Tiaras?

“The judgment,” Huefner explained. “It’s exploiting them to put them out in front of an audience to be judged as opposed to borrowing your mother’s lipstick for a private showing at home.”