According to Wikipedia, a beauty pageant is a contest that mainly focuses on the physical beauty of its contestants. The contests often incorporate personality, talent, and answers to judges’ questions as criteria. The beauty pageant can be traced back a century ago, but the first modern beauty pageant began in 1920 when the first beauty contest was documented in a hotel in Atlantic City. However, the event was not meant to compete for beauty but to promote the hotel. Yet, the documentation gained positive feedback from the audience; it created more contest with similar ideology. Then in 1951, Eric Moley founded Miss World, and the following year Miss Universe was founded. Later in1960 the first Little America Pageant was formed. This event introduced the children into a beauty pageant.
Nowadays, beauty pageants claimed that they serve a purpose; it's not only about looks but also promote self-confidence, leadership, poise, and public speaking. However, the first requirement to enter a beauty contest hasn't changed since centuries ago. The primary requirement is that the contenders must be tall and slim. These things caused fatalities among audiences and contenders. A story that posted on seventeen.com (link below) by Christa Brown depicted the struggle of being Pageants contestant. According to Christa, even she's been told the judges/interviewer to become herself, the judges implicit her to lose weight. Furthermore, on the D day, Christa saw many girls struggled to stay thin, they took laxatives and ate baby food only.
So, are they good or bad? Let me break it down to you. According to debate.com. Beauty pageants have pros and cons.
Pros
- Help get rid of stage fright and boost confidence
- Teach public speaking
- Helps girls feel beautiful inside and out
- Provides scholarships and grants
- Teaches girls to express themselves
- Gives girls an alternative for sports
Cons
- Promotes sexist views, objectifying and sexualizing girls
- Lowers self-esteem because of the primary emphasis on physical beauty
- Makes women more cocky than confident
- Pressures women to strive for unattainable perfection, leading to depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders and poor body-image
The table above shows that the cons are more serious than what we think. It's destructing. Without proper understanding about the sole purpose of beauty pageant both for contenders and audiences, it might do more harm than good.
And what's the point of beauty pageant?
The answer may be tricky. Well, for a contestant, a little bit of sparkly tiara, a beautiful nightgown, and pretty makeup won't hurt. It's about freedom of expression. Some girls like the attention and exposure, and that's okay. If they won, they can also do charity works and advance social works that matter to them. It will become easier since the publicity gained during the event. Also, during the event, the contestant will meet new people, it's called networking. For the audience, it's just a matter of entertainment. The contests are meant to entertain, and that's it.
In reality, it's unlikely that the contests serve its sole purpose. Many people, both contenders, and audiences misinterpret the intent. Many people still believe that the competition is only about beauty and being slim. People still don't understand that beauty is subjective. It's unlike a math problem that has the exact answer - there can be multiple viewpoints on what makes a person beautiful. I have to say that beauty contests should be banned, any kind of it. Beauty should not be standardized. The contest doesn't emphasize the talents of the contenders; instead, they exposed their physical appearance and sex appeal. That's why they put minimum height and body type in the first place as the requirement.
Today, real beauty is about being authentic and transcendent.All of these pageants are very damaging to women, and ‘no’, nothing has changed or improved beyond the fact that the event organizers, promoters and participants are now simply more ‘politically correct.’ We can SAY that it’s about poise, we can SAY it includes a few token questions for the contestants (to see how intelligent, poised, civic-minded, etc. they are), we can SAY it’s about musical/dance, etc. talent, but at the end of the day every single one of these women are of a certain height, below a certain weight, and all are what we’d consider very attractive. Bathing suit competitions? Ball gowns? Really? And yet they still try to tell us this is NOT about conforming to certain standards of beauty? The day I see a short, heavy, ‘unattractive’ woman winning such a pageant, that’s the day I’ll truly know it’s about all that ‘other stuff’ and NOT about looks.
Until such time, these pageants are nothing but substantial money-making schemes for the TV show advertisers, the sponsors, the hotels, and the countries that host the pageants also get a tourism boost. And less directly, such pageants, by perpetuating notions of beauty, help to keep the cosmetics, hair care product, and plastic surgery businesses as a whole, flourishing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment