Miss England made the headlines this week for a variety of reasons.
The first was that there was the very first black winner, which is kind of depressing given its long history (it really had to take until 2009?!) and the second was that it turned out she was voted by committee and came pitifully low in the public vote.
This somewhat undermines the first point as people mumble about ‘political correctness’ in the way that people do. Well, the kind of people who use the phrases ‘rip-off Britain’ and ‘the nanny state’, anyway.
In response, India Knight wrote a Times column saying that after years of believing beauty pageants were incompatible with feminism, she was renouncing that because the girls are ‘inspiring’.
To a certain extent, I see her point. The modern generation of beauty queen tends to be less about children and animals and more about science, literature and sport. But we can’t be surprised that women who fulfil a particular age’s ideal of beauty are also intelligent and well-spoken – that would be as patronising as the judges we’ve long criticised.
True feminism allows every woman a choice, and I don’t want to be the judgmental anti-feminist who says that just because a woman chooses to parade around in a swimsuit to be judged on her physical attributes, she’s letting the side down.
See, I don’t want to be that woman. But I kind of am. I agree with India that there’s no point attacking the beauty pageant any more, but for very different reasons.
Admittedly, I don’t really blame the women specifically. Or even the judges. I’m not quite sure who to blame for society being so superficial, because actually it’s been this way for centuries. All beauty pageants do is tell us that the day-to-day discrimination by appearance that we constantly inflict upon each other – myself included – isn’t stopping any time soon.
That reliable knot of disgruntled women standing outside the pageants protesting isn’t there because each one is ugly, fat, hairy or jealous. Any one of them might be some of other of these things, but that has nothing to do with the truth they’ve all discovered: that there is virtually no way in this life to escape being judged on our appearance.
Research this year has shown that there are more fat men in high ranking roles than fat women. Fat men are successful, layered with the lard of their accomplishments; fat women are obviously slovenly slatterns that just can’t be bothered to make the effort and take their hands out of the cookie tin.
The double standard is oh-so-much more entrenched than a simple beauty pageant can even begin to address. Do I think it’s wrong and pointless to judge a woman on an accident of birth and something so superficial? Yes. But putting a stop to the competition merely strips a layer of peeling wallpaper from the wall; it doesn’t even begin to address the dry rot underneath.
Until we really understand, in our heart of hearts, that it’s not right to make assumptions about someone because of their weight, tattoos, piercings, gender or dress sense, there’s no point turning our noses up at beauty pageants. At least they wear what they are on their slee- erm, bikinis, unlike some of the more po-faced advertisers in the beauty industry who perform the extraordinary sleight of hand of making you think that they’re about inner beauty while selling products to fix everything that’s physically wrong with you.
Those women desperately trying to make the world see how pointless it is to judge someone on their beauty really need to protest how much we judge each other on the lack of it. When we can stop doing that, the very notion of a beauty pageant will become so ridiculous there won’t be anyone wanting to host one, anyway.
Image via Harvard