Monday 2 July 2012

Why we should give up on beauty pageants


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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