Eye Of The Beholder

In case you haven’t been near a calendar recently, the year is 2007, and yet there are still beauty pageants. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy a stage full of comely women in bathing suits or evening gowns posed and smiling, but it’s a mildly titillating experience that really has no positive purpose overall.

Master showman P.T. Barnum was credited as the first modern presenter of the pageant in the 1850’s, although the idea of putting women on display for town and country as personification of their virtues has existed for centuries. Newspapers held photo beauty contests for decades, and locales would often publicize events by holding annual contests to crown a figurehead. It was only in the last 90 years that pageants grew to the popularity and scope they are today (and I use both sparingly).

Like many other awards shows and presentations, public interest has declined over the years, and while Nielsens are hardly the paradigm of accuracy, it does paint a picture with some truth. The irony is that we as a nation and world are more obsessed with beauty than ever before, yet the business of pageants is losing it’s luster (and dollars). Sex and drugs scandals have tarnished the tiara as well, although I think it gives the contests and participants a well needed edginess.

Women will tell you they fight objectification daily, but paradoxically give value to media that encourages them to buy clothing and make up or tells them what shape to be. And still, the thought of contestants preening for objectified judgment is obscene to most women. Beauty pageants, while actually striving to give depth and character to women, end up getting relegated to a place far below modeling, a thriving industry where aspirations, goal, and civic accomplishments are not part of the criteria for success.

In a less shallow society, the pageant had significance, and it certainly was the primary entrance to fame and fortune before Hollywood criteria demanded less of it’s starlets. Being Miss Backwoods County was a stepping stone to getting out of the dirt road place you lived in, but with pavement in abundance these days and the world much smaller, getting a webcam will yield better results than charm school.

Much of the backlash towards beauty contests also comes from the vision of too young girls tarted up like teen prostitutes, being forced into performing and parent pleasing by lesser stage mothers. Looking at a room full of little JonBenet robots, it seems a far cry from the regal and wholesome identity that the competitions had in their heyday. And while the intent is to groom girls into ideal young women, the process is so unspeakably dirty that it corrupts the purity they argue is the redeeming factor in parading women around.

Whenever I see one of these shows, I feel bad for the girls in them. Granted, they’re not doing it in lieu of something more practical, but in their bright eyed, smiley, uplifting happiness, I feel like they’re either too dumb to know they’re not regarded highly, or worse, aware and soldiering through because of their desire to win. I don’t doubt for a minute that they honestly intend to save the planet, spread peace and love, and rescue baby kittens from trees, but it just smacks of stupidity when there’s no trace of anything less than absolute positivism in their nature.

Ultimately, they are a group of homogenized zombies, interchangeable and indoctrinated with the same rhetoric. And in spite of the attempt to shine a glitzier light on it, the notion of the beauty pageant becomes more antiquated each year.

pre-natal pretties!