Dr. Phil's huffing and puffing this afternoon about little girls who perform in pageants. "It's just not right," he keeps sputtering, showing and reshowing pictures of five-year-olds with highly teased hair and lots of heavy-handed makeup. Clearly we are meant to agree that these children look sexually seductive, "like twenty-year-old hookers, as one guest says. And that there's something horribly wrong with all of it, though he cannot say quite what.

First of all, they don't look like hookers. They look like matrons. There's a big difference, but the discourse on these pageants is so limited that it tends to regurgitate untenable assertions about how it's wrong to make kids look hot rather than examining larger issues regarding constructions of femininity and the function of celebrity. The good doctor wants to titillate us so he needs to imply that something heinous is taking place when bored southern housewives take their girls and parade them up and down runways that no one but other bored housewives are watching.

"Do you know pedophiles look at websites for pictures of children?" he asks, getting as close as he can to implicating the moms in sex trafficking. As to the hair and makeup, he's disturbed at how "unnatural" it looks. So has he looked at his wife lately? She's there at every show, the supportive and loving woman, who escorts him offstage presumably gushing about how wonderful he is, since that is what she gets paid for. Her hair is teased and blown, her makeup heavy, her features altered, her clothing matching normative femme dictates.

Why is it unnatural on a five-year-old and not on a forty-five-year-old? Well the obvious answer is because Mrs Dr Phil is old enough to choose to trick herself out in order to attract and keep the moneybags talk show host she's married to. But that does not mean that she looks natural, nor that it is natural for us women to be expected to alter our appearances in radical ways that men are not expected to. Look at Phil. I'd say he puts a shine on his bald head and he's out the door. As a man he already has weight and authority and power and his dress affirms that. Look at me, I don't need to bow and scrape to get your attention and approval. That's what his norms say. We women, on the other hand, are told daily in ways large and small that we do not and should not have power in and of ourselves and the only power we will ever have will come from attracting the male gaze.

Even a five-year-old knows that.