And so the Miss Universe pageant ends with a tirade of angry Filipinos making snarky remarks about the contestants, the judges and anything else they can dig their catty claws in. With the Philippine contestant finishing in 4th place rather than the anticipated win this year, all the sore losers and sour grapers have unleashed their vitriol upon the social networking world.
“Shamcey Supsup should have won, she’s the only contestant who dared to answer her question in English instead of using a translator!”
“Oprah Winfrey herself said that Shamcey should have won because she didn’t have an interpreter to stall for time!”
“Miss Angola didn’t even answer the question!”
“The question that Miss Angola was asked was too easy!”
For starters, the alleged remark by Oprah is a hoax. Second, why are beauty pageants still even relevant in today’s society?
The problem with beauty pageants is that they have absolutely no substance. Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying the contestants themselves have no substance, but the competition itself.
The problem with beauty pageants is that they are basically a celebration of arbitrarily-defined standards of beauty. Where are the short girls? The voluptuous girls? The girls with flat noses and thick lips? The girls with short hair? How can anyone possibly claim that “inner, universal beauty” is what this competition is about when there isn’t even much diversity in what they consider beautiful?
“But that’s what the question and answer portion is for!” you protest?
These girls are trained for months by professional coaches to answer the judges’ questions in a way that is crowd-pleasing and sprinkled with fairy dreams, rainbows and unicorns. Shamcey’s answer, I believe, was feminist, honest and from the heart and it cost her the win. But I didn’t complain and wasn’t even surprised because that’s what beauty pageants are like. The judges don’t want to hear real opinions, they want to hear a robot programmed to say the “correct” thing, whether or not that’s how she really feels.
If the contestants were really going to answer honestly, maybe Miss Angola would have said that the one thing she would change about her physical assets would be bigger boobs. Maybe another contestant would have said that her greatest dream would be to marry Brad Pitt. Maybe another would have said that she would prefer to spend the rest of her days languishing on a tropical island rather than trying to achieve world peace. And these answers would still say absolutely nothing about what these women are really worth as a person. I have several friends who have been beauty pageant contestants (and a few who have been winners) and it is ridiculous to think that people can just judge their entire being based on a hokey pre-programmed answer to a cheesy question. They are so much more than that.
The problem with most beauty pageants is that they do not place value in anything that is real. Small wonder that most countries don’t place much importance in them anymore. And I would sooner respect Miss Universe as an institution if they just lost all the pretense that it is anything other than what it is: a showcase of currently-marketable physical attractiveness.
Because trying to convince us that this show holds anything of substance is just insulting.
PS – I did not watch the show. I read the news and FB updates and I saw the pictures. Yes, I thought the contestants were all very pretty. And congratulations to the winners for achieving their goals, even if I don’t like the competition.
