I should be honest: I couldn't watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. After fifteen minutes of Go Go Juice and pageant tantrums, I had to turn it off — not because I disapproved of the Thompson-Shannon family, but because I resented that the show wanted me to disapprove of them. It's the same way I feel when I watch Toddlers and Tiaras, where hyperprojecting mothers b****-slap sequins onto eager-to-please daughters, inviting the viewer to wonder, What train wreck of adulthood lies ahead for America's Honey Boo Boos?
I arrive at this question a little defensively because I am myself the alumna of one child pageant: I placed second runner-up in Miss Preteen Minneapolis 1996. And no feminist is more agog than I am to report that my pageant experience was generally positive. (Of course, this may be informed by the fact that I placed.) But was I the norm or the anomaly? To find out, I interviewed adult alumnae of child pageants about how they feel about it in retrospect — and reconsidered my own experience.
and then later she writes this
Before setting out to find and interview subjects for this article, probably ten people in my life knew about Miss Preteen Minneapolis. My most salient memory from the experience — other than the forest-green Dyeable pumps that matched my forest-green velvet-and-taffeta dress — is the pageant director teaching me how to give a firm handshake.
Recently, I visited a college class my friend teaches on critical thinking. “What assumptions would you make about me if I told you I was Miss Preteen Minneapolis 1996?” I asked. (I often abbreviate the story this way, which is, of course, telling. A Google search reveals that the actual Miss Preteen Minneapolis 1996 grew up to be a model. She appears on the covers of romance novels and in at least one Fruit of the Loom underwear campaign.) After being reassured that I wouldn’t be offended by anything they said, the all-female class told me I was vain, conceited, stuck up, full of myself — they couldn’t possibly have found more derisive ways to say, “You know you’re pretty” — stupid, trashy, and probably a b***.
“Okay,” I said, struggling to make good on my promise not to be offended. “What assumptions would you make about me if I told you I had two degrees from Columbia University?” All of a sudden I was smart, ambitious, successful, high-achieving, and rich. The only common descriptor to the two prompts was “stuck up.”
We can opt out of pageants, but we're still stuck with the double blind in which America entraps all competitive, consciously sexual women: female competitions are a loser's game because you're ugly if you lose, and shameless if you win. Between the women who told their stories here and the pageants, judges, and titleholders I spoke to in the process of finding them, two narratives emerged: We competed in pageants because we (and our mothers) wanted to win. But we resist talking about it with outsiders, lest they mistake us for something we're not. We share the pride and humiliation at competitive femininity—or perhaps just competitiveness itself.
