Botox For Kids: It's The Trend

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzvSkIk7xg

Over the weekend I came across a youtube video of a pageant mom injecting Botox to her 8-year old daughter. The interview on Good Morning America terrified me in terms of how far parents will go for their little girls to survive in the pageant world. 

The mother explains that her daughter was complaining about her wrinkles on her face whenever she saw herself in the mirror. When she brought up the use of Botox, an anti-wrinkle formula usually used for older aging women, her daughter Britney was thrilled. She grew up watching her mother inject herself with Botox so the first time she got her first injection, ‘she was fine with it’. In addition, the mother admits to waxing her daughter’s legs because ‘girl’s legs look better without hair’.

The thing that strikes me the most is why an 8-year old girl needs this kind of cosmetic treatment to remove lines and wrinkles. I mean does she really have wrinkles that are recognizable? And how were the mother and their family okay with putting their youngest daughter through such excruciating pain?

When Lara Spencer, the interviewer, asked if there were any psychological damages done on Britney, the mother simply told her that Britney is a ‘normal’ 8-year old who is happy, smart, and likes to run around and play. She mentions the fact that she was influenced by some of the other pageant moms when they told her of the obvious lines and wrinkles on Britney’s face. She justifies her action by saying that other pageant moms do it as well and it’s a necessary step in order to compete in the pageant industry.

But if anyone sees the face of Britney before she got Botox, people will most definitely not say anything about her lines or her wrinkles; simply because they are barely recognizable. I mean have you ever seen an 8-year old girl with wrinkles? So why would this mother risk her daughter’s health and safety by injecting her with Botox? Is winning a pageant that serious?

I guess I understand why aging women use Botox to remove their lines and wrinkles because it boosts their self esteem and their confidence. However, the use of Botox on an 8-year old girl is just out of the question. Britney’s mom is only enforcing the fact that wrinkles and lines are ugly. How can Botox be beneficial to a little girl who barely knows what she got herself into?

Jasmine

During the last reading assignment of Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, we saw Jasmine struggle to find her true identity as she was trying to fulfil the two roles of ‘Jyoti’ and ‘Jasmine’. When she loses her father and her husband in a very tragic accident, she is devastated by their loss and attempts to find herself by going overseas to Florida.

In the last chapter, we encounter a side of Jasmine that we’ve never encountered before. When Half-Face carries her luggage to her room, he takes advantage of her and rapes her and tells her ‘I got things I can do for you and you got something you can do for me, and I got lots of other things I can do to you, understand?’ (113). He rapes the innocent soul and virtue out of her and we quickly see the violent side of Jasmine- she takes the knife Kingsland gave to her on their way to Florida, and stabs Half-Face to death.

I found it interesting when she said ‘We are all put on this earth for a purpose, Mataji would have said. All acts are connected. For every monster there is a hero. For every hero, a monster’ (114) because it sounded like she was justifying her act of killing Half-Face. I’m not saying that women should hide rape incidents as a secret but all I’m trying to say is that she shouldn’t have killed him because she could have been the bigger person and reported her case to the police. This is a debatable question but I don’t think killing is the answer to get revenge on someone. Jasmine needs to start reasoning her action with what she believes in, not what she was told or what someone in the past has said. I think this is a consequence of her struggle to find her identity because if she had known who she was, what her purpose in life is, and what things she lives up to, this incident wouldn’t have happened.

Identity Crisis

I’m sure many of the students at ASL have moved around the world due to their parent’s job and have had to adjust to their new surroundings and culture. I have been moving to different places around the world since I was a baby and I can definitely say that moving is never easy. It sucks having to leave one place to another, saying goodbye to your family and friends, and leaving behind the good old memories and making new ones. Personally, the hardest thing for me when I moved from New York to Tokyo was finding my identity.

One of the toughest questions to answer is when people ask me where I am from. I lived in Indonesia for the first four years of my life, then moved back to Tokyo and spent three years, then moved to New York and spent seven years, then back to Tokyo for two years, and then here to London. It seems like a simple question but what’s the proper answer to that question?

Upon moving back to Tokyo from New York, I felt like a complete foreigner. I didn’t feel comfortable being in this new surrounding, I felt like I stood out from the crowd, and I didn’t feel like I blended in with the rest of the people. Attending an international school made it even harder for me to feel comfortable in the country where I was born and at times I felt like I was dishonouring my family because I would tell people that I was from New York, which to me back then seemed to be my home.

But when I moved to Europe in 2009, I was amazed to observe a melting pot of different ethnic groups: a sea of cultures ebbing and flowing through the city of London. This was the first time I felt comfortable with my identity because a few months after I moved to London, I began to miss everything about Japan and that’s when I realized my close attachment to Japan.

This identity crisis is something I share with the main character, Jasmine. Getting married young and being separated from her family at such a young age, she struggled with her thoughts about her identity. She was Jyoti to Hasnapur and Mataji but she soon became Jasmine to Prakash. But later when Hasnapur and Prakash died, she didn’t know who she was or what her purpose in life was.  

Lower Eastside Girl's Club in New York

Over the royal wedding weekend, I went on the Harlem Learning Trip with my community service group to get insights and ideas on how we can improve the Winchester Project from visiting similar organizations in New York.

One of the organizations we visited was the Lower Eastside Girl's Club which is a projects that addresses the lack of services and resources available to young girls and women. Through many activities and workshops in arts, science and technology, health and wellness, and literacy, this projects helps young girls and women find their individual skills and passion and continue to develop these interests to their full potential.

Our group was warmly welcomed by the members of the Girl's Club with a special performance by a singer who sang songs about raising awareness of violence against women and also to encourage women to stand up and defend for themselves. We then had a group of girls go on stage to talk about how the Girl's Club has helped them boost their self-esteem and how it has become a home for them. One of the girl's went on stage to talk about how she recently read The Vagina Monologue by Eve Ensler. Similar to what a lot of the people said in class, she mentioned how in the beginning she was uncomfortable to read a play on vaginas but once she began talking about it with her peers, she was empowered and it became a natural topic for everyone to talk about.She loved how the play was basically a conversation and she thought that creating this framework for sharing stories about embodied experiences is really important.

I definitely agree with her and I think Eve Ensler did a fantastic job in writing these play as if they were conversations she was having with the person she was interviewing. It created such a realistic atmosphere for the audience and I think that made it easier and more comfortable for everyone. I really liked how she introduced us to the word 'vagina' in a humoristic way because it allows her readers to become comfortable and encourages them to change for the better about female discrimination.