Analysis Of Skip Hollandsworth's 'Toddlers In Tiaras'

Skip Hollandsworth’s “Toddlers in Tiaras” argues the negative effects of participating in beauty pageants for young girls. Hollandsworth supported his argument through the use of the following techniques: narratives, testimonies, logical reasoning, appeals to emotion, facts, and an objective tone that attempts to give him credibility. These techniques are used to help persuade his audience of the exploitation of young girls in beauty pageants and the negative effects that pageants will have on their lives.
Hollandsworth begins his article with how a typical beauty pageant runs and describes the multiple steps Eden Wood, a pageant contestant, goes through in order to get ready for a competition (490). He goes on to describe the costs of beauty

An example of this is when he describes the death of JonBenet Ramsey, a pageant girl who had been brutally murdered, and talks of the fear created among pageant contestants by Ramsey’s death, and the real possibility of pedophiles that could stalk pageants (492-493). Here he is trying to evoke sadness for the death of this little girl and to create fear of the possible dangers of being in beauty pageants. He also created emotion when uses narratives to describe the typical life of a pageant girl, for example when Hollandsworth using a tone of ridicule to describe Eden as “just another country girl, cute but not particularly beautiful” (495-496). The lengths at which parents will go to for their child to win a beauty pageant and the cost of these things is portrayed in a tone of criticism, such as “Parents, many of whom have only modest incomes, pay for high-glitz coaches, high-glitz wig makers, and high-glitz spray tanners” (492). In this quote the criticism is that parents who don’t make very much money are spending lots on no essentials for their kids. There are a variety of facts used in Hollandsworth’s article; however there are a select few that he makes good use of for his argument. Hollandsworth states that $4 billion is annually spent on Disney Princess retail; he uses this fact to claim that girls who wanted to be like princesses did beauty

Such as when Hollandsworth tries make a connection between Disney Princesses and the growth of participating in beauty pageants. He provides not actual data to support this he just claims this happens because of this. This would be an example of the fallacy faulty causality. Another type of fallacy used in this article is scare tactics. Hollandsworth creates a feeling of fear by talking about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey by providing the opinion of Stacy Dittrich, a former detective, to explain the possible killer of Ramsey was a pedophile and goes on to talk about the real possibility of the girls being stalked at pageants (492). Hollandsworth creates fear when he provides a testimony from Brooke Breedwell, a beauty pageant contestant during the time of Ramsey, which describes her fear of being targeted by the same killer of Ramsey (492). This us of the scare tactic takes away from the argument because Hollandsworth is trying to get the reader emotionally involved. Additionally Hollandsworth indirectly uses hasty generalization when he uses a quote from Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality: “no one wants to deal with the bigger picture, which is the day-to-day sexualization of all our daughter” (494). Here, it makes the assumption that everyone feels that his or her daughter is being