You have probably heard of Sheena Upton, the California mom who claimed to inject her eight-year-old daughter, Britney, with botox to improve her chances of winning a beauty pageant.
After child protective services took her girl away to investigate the case, Upton claimed she fabricated the entire story for compensation. She was in fact paid $200 to hold a syringe with a clear liquid, and in her video stated that she didn’t even know what botox was.
So why is there a video of her injecting her daughter with a syringe? And why did Upton justify this by claiming that other moms give botox treatments to their daughters in order to play the tough beauty pageant game?
In one of the interviews which you can view here, her daughter said, “I just, like, don’t think wrinkles are nice on little girls.” She also said that it “hurts,” and that her mother also waxed the hairs off her legs and when asked why, Britney answered, “It’s not ladylike to have hair.”
The concern is how this will impact Britney psychologically, as well as any other girls who are going through the same loss of innocence.
I find it so depressing to hear about all the pressures girls seem to be going through today, especially after hearing Britney say that she puts up with the pain of botox injections to look “beautiful and pretty.” I am deeply saddened, as are most mothers and grandmothers. I wrote a previous article on what is considered a beautiful woman in different countries around the world which sparked several comments.
This topic relates to a book I am reading, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein, where she states, “According to a 2006 survey of more than two thousand school-aged children, girls repeatedly described a paralyzing pressure to be ‘perfect’: not only to get straight As and be the student body president, editor of the newspaper, and captain of the swim team but also to be ‘kind and caring,’ ‘please everyone, be very thin, and dress right.’ …They now feel they must not only ‘have it all’ but be it all: Cinderella and Supergirl. Agressive and agreeable. Smart and stunning. Does that make them the beneficiaries of new opportunities or victims of a massive con job?”
Orenstein then continues, “It is as if the more girls achieve the more obsessed they become with appearance–not dissimilar to the way the ideal of the ‘good mother’ was ratcheted up just as adult women flooded the workforce.”
So where are girls and women heading in the next ten-twenty years? Any thoughts on this topic are welcome. I’m particularly interested in what men think?
