Proposal

In the United States beauty pageants take many forms from small town high school contests to the wold broadcasted Miss America Pageant. Girls as young as five years old go to great lengths to look and act the part of women five times their age, all with parental consent. To those of us who look at this practice from an outsider's perspective the idea of five year olds wearing makeup, going tanning and watching their weight seems obscene. Women who carry on in pageants to adulthood dedicate their lives to looking pretty, answering interview questions and walking down a runway. To me and many other Americans this doesn't make sense but to those who were brought up through pageants it is not just a competition but a way of life. I would like to examine with a non-critical eye what this world is like from the inside and what makes people want to be a part of it.