Hate your kids? Considering voodoo? Cut out the middleman

It is long overdue. Chris invited me to join his team many months ago, hoping to package and commodify my intense rage for the audience of his website. I have questioned my suitability for the job ever since it was offered, because I am older now: a calmer man, a baker of cakes. My anger is exhausted. It wheezes from a lifetime of barking, and sleeps so deeply that I sometimes have to nudge it to check it hasn’t died. My thanks, then, to the United States of America for igniting a new and mighty fireball in my internal furnace.

Acrid tentacles of smoke licked around my tonsils as I digested the news of an 8-year-old child whose mother injects her with botox to prevent wrinkles. A contestant in child beauty pageants, the girl has been pushed in front of the cameras to explain her allegedly keen interest in having botulism injected into her face. Already, I can feel the flames dimming and the realisation is dawning that this piece is going to be nowhere near as bile-filled as it should be. I will need your help, so please sit back and watch the following video. Ladies and gentlemen, let us stoke our collective fury:

As Kerry Campbell, the girl’s mother, explains: “I think a lot of the kids making the big impression on the lines on her face and stuff, like, made her probably influence her to want to do it a little bit more [sic] [and sick].”

It would be easy to dismiss this as the statement of an imbecile, so I will, but the wobbly sentence construction seems to be a consequence of the mother’s turmoil. I think she knows this is wrong, but is unwilling to take responsibility for what she has done so she wriggles on the hook. This is something which has been forced upon this mother by other 8-year-olds, or the parents of those children, the tough world of the pageants or even her own child.

“What do you do it for?” the interviewer asks Brittany. “I don’t know,” she says. Her mother anxiously cuts in: “Do you do it because you see wrinkles?”

“Oh yeah,” her daughter replies… and your heart breaks.

Comments are disabled on the YouTube video, so I’ve turned to Gawker and Jezebel to get a measure of the opinion of US citizens. As you would expect, almost every respondent is horrified by the whole affair, but certain comments are revealing of a broader problem.

Lost_grrl writes: “This little girl needs to be told that she is beautiful, pretty and all those other nice words without botox!”

No, she doesn’t. It is this strange aspect of Americanised parenting that is causing a milder but equally pernicious form of this weirdness all over the Western world. We’ve been told this so many times by movies and daytime chat shows, and now many of us accept it as true when it is really total nonsense. Your children do not need to be told they are beautiful. They need to know you love them, and they need to be praised for the things they do well. The drawbacks of praising a child for their physical appearance should be obvious to anyone.

The prize for Most Alarming Comment was won with ease by AwwwwShiz:

“Unfortunately most of these little girls really aren’t even that pretty. Most of the pageant girls I see on TV are barely average. When I think ‘small person beauty queen’ I think of Anna Nicole’s daughter or one of the Jolie-Pitt girls. And now I’m going to hell for ragging on an 8 year old.”

No, you’re going to Hell for rating pre-pubescent girls on their relative sexiness.

More worrisome than these comments, the mother’s attitude, or perhaps even the practice of Botox injections is the matter of Brittany’s “virgin waxing”. Good Morning America skated over this somewhat, describing it as the waxing of the “upper leg area” to destroy formative hair cells in the skin of young girls to permanently prevent future hair growth. You might think the upper leg area is the thigh, but this is the ABC News code for “vulva”. A few years ago, a new cosmetic trend was established; parents are now taking their children of single-figure age to salons to rip out the roots of hairs which would have transformed into pubic hairs at puberty. Apparently, the removal of teenage girls’ pubic hair is an expensive burden on the modern parent, but spendthrift mothers and fathers can make use of a few “virgin wax” sessions so that they can put that pubic budget into the kids’ college fund. “A stitch in time saves nine”, eh?

As predicted, this article has been somewhat feeble: a world away from the kind of sweary diatribe Chris and Phil demanded. I’ll try harder next time, with subject matter that induces more agitation than weary despair.