Every so often I am
amazed to find coverage of a beauty pageant in the tabloids and various online
news outlets. In fact, you can pick
up any newspaper, or visit any ‘news’ website and there will undoubtedly be a
woman in a bikini gazing back at you who claims to be
Miss England, Or Miss Great Britain, or a one-time man or, beauty of beauties,
Miss Universe.
As far as I can tell
the majority of the non-participating public couldn’t give a damn about beauty
pageants. They stopped being televised (in the UK at least) and any news
coverage is usually limited to the Sidebar of Shame in the Daily Mail. However, there are still thousands of
young women who believe that winning a pageant, or just appearing in one could
elevate them to low-level stardom. The kind of stardom that allows you to mooch
about in Juicy Couture tracksuits and Ugg boots with a small dog protruding
from your handbag while the paparazzi try to catch a flash of your cellulite. It
seems that having your beauty recognised (if not your cellulite) is still one
of the best things that can happen for the young women who are paying vast sums
of money to enter and take part in these competitions. So of course the organisers still
have cash rolling in and the pageants keep on running and wrinkly, permatanned
male judges still keep wanking under their judges’ tables as the parade of
20ish-old women amble by with their boobs protruding from gloriously,
erotically stretched Lycra.
It seems that
pageants, which claim to celebrate this beauty, are the societal equivalent of
10-year old chewing gum stuck to the underside of your desk that has the
structural integrity of reinforced concrete. It aint budging. So as it looks as though we will be unable
to slough the beauty pageant gum from our collective consciousness for some
time yet I am devoting this post to debunking some of the positive beauty
pageant myths that get wheeled out every time somebody wishes to justify the
continued existence of this immovable MacGyver glue.
There are a number of
arguments that get used all the time in response to the Pageant Haters,
those butt-clenchingly ugly, boring feminists who are clearly just jealous and
who demand that pageants demean women and do far more harm than good, and who
also demand to know why the fuck we are still happy for the world of pageants
to exist at all. These arguments
get repeated ad nauseum by pageant
organisers and sponsors and by the entrants themselves to justify the continued market for pageants. In this post I don’t intend to go into why
beauty pageants are morally wrong and bad for women, since that’s been done so
many times before. I intend to answer the arguments supporting beauty pageants
and demonstrate that no matter how positively you try to spin them, beauty
pageants are, for all their spin and sparkle, utterly pointless.
Argument numero uno:
Beauty pageants do not
simply celebrate outward, or physical beauty; they celebrate empowered,
talented, educated women who aspire to achieve their goals through hard work,
talent and charm.
While there is a
shed-load of vacuous drivel in this argument (the word ‘empowered’ now needs to
be banned when used in all contexts bar the workings of pedal bikes) this is
actually a strong argument and the number one, go-to retort to level at pageant
haters. Pageants celebrate the
whole woman, not just the shell, but we have to accept that the shell is still
important. Beautiful people are allegedly more successful than their less
pretty counterparts. Doors get opened for beautiful women, both metaphorical
doors and actual ones. We
all like to take care of ourselves don’t we? Beauty is valuable and important
to all of us, in addition to ‘what’s inside’ so we should rightfully celebrate it.
Well, first of all,
this argument can only be used if pageant organisers are willing to acknowledge
that human beauty is highly variable and unconfined to the long haired,
pert-breasted, slim beauty with arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose and flawless
skin that pageants seem to love the way I love Ben and Jerry's. Where are the larger women,
where are the women in wheelchairs, or the women with prostheses that aren’t
covered by their evening gowns? (Yes I remember Heather Mills- whoop de do, one
woman!) Where are the women with
freckles or short hair or blue hair?
Where is the body art? Where are the piercings? Where are the scars? Where are the muscles, the training
injuries, and the evidence of having lived?
How can Miss Universe
claim to celebrate universal female beauty when all the contestants look like
they've stepped out of the Barbies of The World Museum? Different skin colours alone do not different kinds of
beauty make. The physical ‘beauty’
celebrated by pageants is the aesthetic initially made popular by the porn
industry and echoed now in the beauty, advertising and film industries. Anyone who does not conform to
this limited aesthetic need not apply to enter a beauty pageant. You won’t get
in Sweethearts. There there.
By this logic, if you
wish to argue that pageants celebrate the ‘whole package’ you have to conclude
that you are reinforcing the notion (along with every Disney film containing a
human, female character) that to be a truly kind, caring, courageous, valiant
and graceful woman, it helps if you look like a porn star too.
Beauty pageants
celebrate a specific flavour of beauty only. There is no recognition that women
are actually capable of looking physically stunning in many different ways and
therefore, they deny women the right to define what beauty is for
themselves. Beauty Pageants are
about as undemocratic as you can get.
Beauty pageants allow
you to represent your country/gender/age on a world stage
So does the Six
Nations Rugby tournament, the World Wrestling championships, The International
Moustache festival and the World Chess Championships. More people probably
watch or attend those events too.
As beauty pageants are no longer televised in many countries, having
fallen out of favour with the public, the national press and television
networks, to whom are you representing your age/gender/bra size? The same goes for using beauty pageants
as a forum to raise awareness of your country’s plights or your own beliefs. If
very few people are actually seeing you unless you win the entire pageant after
being successful in every round, why not find a more reliable medium for
projecting your message?
Awe-inspiring, society-changing revolutions and city-destroying riots
have been propagated via Twitter so why not use that instead? Cheaper, more
effective and you don’t have to wax.
Beauty pageant winners
often win scholarships to study at university and as higher education is so expensive,
beauty pageants could be the only chance of reaching one’s potential for some
women.
Higher education is
certainly expensive. But so are
pageant entry fees, hair extensions, gel nails, St Tropez tan treatments,
multiple evening gowns, cocktail dresses, good quality swimwear, shoes, airline
tickets, hotel bills, hour-long phone calls home when the other girls are being
bitchy. Some young women can
literally pay thousands to enter beauty pageants only to fall at the final
hurdle, recouping no financial gains in return. Very few newspapers would pay good money for an exclusive
interview with the runner-up.
While they go home feeling inadequate some old pervert or misguided
middle-aged women whose pageant days are long behind her is spending that money
on a new BMW. University is
expensive, but so are pageants and only one woman out of thousands of entrants
can win. I’d rather take my
chances with the Student Loans Company.
As a Miss
World/Country/Nation, you can become an ambassador for your country or a
charity cause and raise awareness long after the pageant has ended.
Again, you do not have
to be pretty, or slim, or own lots of nice dresses or win a beauty contest to
do valuable work for charity. You
need to have some spare time.
If doing good deeds means that much to you then volunteer. If doing good
deeds seems like a glamorous add-on to your primary job roles of advertising
toothpaste, having your cleavage photographed and receiving endorsement gift
bags at parties then you are a shallow fool and you will probably fail the part
of the beauty pageant where you have to pretend to care about old people and
animals.
As a Miss
World/Country/Nation, you can become a role model for young people. ‘I could give the poor children of the
slums in India real hope that they too, one day, can be like me. ‘
Further to my response
to argument number one, looking like a porn star and acting with grace and dignity
does not make you a role model, it makes you a perfectly motorised sex doll. Furthermore, any arguments pertaining to
wanting to use a beauty pageant as a platform to help or inspire people or
speak out against injustice demonstrates a sad lack of understanding of your
own odds of winning a pageant. You
may be the most beautiful woman in the world, but if you have an off day and
stumble in your stilettos during the swimwear round, fluff your lines while
claiming that you ‘love’ to help disabled people or demonstrate the merest
shadow of cellulite you could loose. Would you really be willing to risk the
chance to fulfil your ardent desire to help people on the unlikely odds of
winning a pageant with thousands of entrants who all possess exactly the same
kind of beauty as you? You will be
helping no one unless you are very, very lucky.
By entering a beauty
pageant I can support/inspire/encourage my fellow women
Given that beauty
pageants support limited portrayals of beauty, reinforce notions that young
girls have to be princesses to be worth anything, cost a lot of money, offer
very poor odds on allowing women to make any sort of difference in the world
and attract rather shallow people whose real priorities lie in being told
they’re sexy, who do you think you are inspiring by taking part in pageants?
Feminists and other
people who go on about beauty pageants being awful are just jealous of the
contestants’ beauty and should allow women to celebrate their beauty if they
want to. It’s their choice!
If you value your own ‘beauty’
enough to spend your time and your money regularly enhancing it and augmenting
it with plastic, nylon and other people’s hair then it might be very tempting
to think that all women value their own beauty just as much, even if it isn’t
as potent and striking as yours.
It’s true that all women get jealous too. So do all men, children and possibly other mammals and
birds. You may be
soul-destroyingly jealous of the beautiful young women who make it through to
the next round of the contest when you don’t, or heartbroken when the girl you
thought of as your best friend bitches about you and claims that you’re ugly
without make up when she doesn’t make it through and you do. You may also develop a terrible
psychosis where you believe that even your pet budgie is jealous of your beauty
so universal is the terrible curse of jealousy…
However, feelings of jealousy
only take you so far on the road to opposing the idea of beauty pageants. Worrying that pageants continue to
encourage the sexual objectification of women and the view that women are there
to be admired while they’re busy making a difference to the world stems from a
vast number of women wishing that we could do away with such outmoded and
damaging notions. Feminism doesn’t
have roots in jealousy of other women.
Perhaps as feminists we should be embracing beauty pageants in staunch support
of our fellow women who choose to uphold the notion that you have to be slim
and pretty and poised to be of any value to society or to yourself. But,
feminism is not about supporting bad choices and damaging practices just
because the people participating in them have vaginas. Beauty pageants are a bad idea and
feminism has no room for bad ideas.
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