Toddlers & Tiaras' Pageant Director to Critics: Don't Be Ugly
No show provokes a gut reaction like Toddlers & Tiaras (Wednesdays, 10/9c, TLC). Those who aren't entranced by the very specific, extremely odd cultural world of child beauty pageants tend to wring their hands and decry the behavior on display as despicable or abusive. Reality TV has a way of bringing out the armchair psychologists, but to tackle the issues the show brings up, we thought we'd talk to an expert on the side of the pageants: Annette Hill runs the circuit Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants that the show frequently profiles. She is outspoken, passionate and more than a little defensive over criticism. Still, she runs her business like an open book, having incorporated TV coverage from the start and keeping her pageants open to the public. (In the interest of providing full disclosure, she also invited me down to their nationals pageant in November. Should the invitation stand come pageant time, I will absolutely take her up on it.)
Below, we hit Hill with just about every critique we could think of: the idea that pageants sexualize children, the toll pageants could take on the competitors' psyches, the unease that seeing a child in full makeup can provoke, the curse of the stage parent. Gamely, she tackles the ire head on...
