The holding of beauty pageants have long been around since time immemorial. We anticipate these events time: from the amateur village contest, to international competitions like Miss Universe. In many ways, it is a celebration of “beauty, body and brains” – the three things most women dream of having.
Many argue that pageants empower women. After all, they ramp around and show off the good things about them. They walk like a queen, dress like a queen, and talk like a queen. The crown will give them a voice: for the underprivileged, for the downtrodden, for the poor, for world peace.
And so, motherhood statement after motherhood statement, we love to hear them spew it out.
The Miss VSU 2014 Facebook page’s description is a perfect example of the kind of vague but meaningless word play we use to glorify these events: a “transcending celebration of once a frail women into power, wisdom and royalty.”
Wow.
Now stop laughing and let that sink in for a moment.
True, the beauty pageant appears to be a good avenue to show off the things women enjoy: being beautiful, putting on makeup, wearing nice clothes and shoes, showing them off, and the sense of confidence and accomplishments they feel after. True, its organizers may have noble intentions of using this competition as a platform to raise awareness on developmental issues like poverty, AIDS, or peace. And true, it proves to be good business venture since it draws crowds every time.
Many love it, to be honest. The Miss VSU finds itself with a full house of audience every year (or every other, other year?) it is held. And look how it engages people online, in social media.
Pageant pages get 1,000 likes in a week or so, compared to the months it takes a Student Council page to get the same number.
So it must be good. So it must be empowering. Or is it?
We talk of stereotypes as if it’s some form of stigma, especially when it pertains to women and their roles in the society. We often emphasize that women are not what we think they are: the weaker and all. We want to be radical. We want to break free of conventions, of power belonging only to men. So we try to question the status qou.
Isn’t that we try to do in pageants? We want women to break free from the ‘traditional roles’.
We want women to take on adjectives not commonly associated with being feminine: confident, outgoing, brave, strong and yes, empowered.
But come to think of it: observe how viewers react. Look at how she walks. I don’t like her butt. It looks like her false eyelashes are falling off. Her boobs are bouncing ever so awkwardly. Mura siya’g bayot (she looks gay) – whatever that means.
(Which also brings us to the matter about pageants not being produced by women. Many are of the opinion that we don’t really find women on stage, but women formed in the image of the women impersonators behind the production.)
We don’t find a strong and empowered woman, more than a sum of her parts. We have the essence of being a women watered down to her physical attributes instead. We are stripping her of her soul. We dehumanize her, and make her an object.
And change whose parts we can behold, fantasize, lust after, or criticize: her legs, her breasts or her nose. It’s a showpiece an advertisement of what a woman should have to consider her a beauty queen.
Our rigorous measures show how superficial our description of beauty is. Height requirements. Vital statistics. And in the Philippines, to look like ‘foreigner’ rather than a ‘native’ Filipina appears to be a plus. You have to have a particular way of walking with super high heels. All these seen to set emphasis on the physical appearance rather than what’s within. Isn’t this stereotyping?
Physical beauty is a good thing, and we ought to celebrate it. Men fancy beautiful women, and so do other women, wishing they have those perfect vital statistics and beauty to behold.
A lot of good things have come out of pageants as well. Beauty queens and muses go around as ambassadors of goodwill and noble causes, visiting earthquake victims in Haiti, or feeding malnourished children in Africa. (Or is this just for publicity?). Wait, what do Miss VSU winners do after they get crowned, anyway?
The Philippines also have our own share of celebrated queens: Diaz, Marquez, Quiambao, Raj, Quigaman, Supsup, and Arida, to name a few. It gives a sense of pride that they have walked in the international stage and made country famous as a dwelling place of goddesses.
You see, pageants are not necessarily wrong. This isn’t an argument of moral black and white.
The point is, we need to look beyond its face value (pun intended).
One of the reasons why organizations and businesses hold beauty pageants is its revenue. But in the case of VSU, where the Miss VSU pageant ends with a deficit every year (yes, our tickets are not enough to pay all the expenses), it rather escapes that business logic.
Perhaps this deficit is telling: of bad business management, or maybe students just don’t think it gives them the value for their money, or better, students are now critical about matters like these.
Another, as an academic institution, we should be the first to start an intelligent discussion about women and pageants. The students, through its Council, can initiate dialogue about it. Not only about the great debate on gender equality or women empowerment. Fielding a candidate entails a budget, and the student or the council bears the brunt of spending for the snacks, costumes, makeup, and training of their candidate. We spend as much as two tickets to support our college’s candidate, but we still have to buy an actual ticket to get to watch the show.
To hold a show that claims to empower women by showing off physical qualities that only few possess – doesn’t sound it ironic? Women ought to be celebrated in whatever form, with whatever strengths, weaknesses and talent they have, in whatever physical state they are in. we came home from these pageants feeling insecure about our image. Even boyfriends may feel their girlfriends aren’t ‘good enough’.
To say it that it’s a “transcending celebration of once a frail woman into power, wisdom and royalty” not only shows that we haven’t really grasped what gender equality and women empowerment are, we are also enforcing the very stereotypes we say we want to change. In the end, the ‘power’ we bequeath the winning candidates ends right on stage, and makes it nowhere in real life.
To say that we are an academic community but we avoid tackling the topic of women’s rights with regards to holding a pageant as an anniversary highlight, or at the very least, fail to embed an intelligent discussion about developmental issues in the pageant program, shows that we are not entirely living up to our stature as a premier university in the Philippines.
We have to start rethinking about pageants, than blindly supporting and attending it. If we are to make women really free, really empowered, confident, strong and capable, we have to admit that continuing this tradition without stopping to think isn’t the solution.
Beauty pageants are not necessarily wrong. We just have to stop that it is what really isn’t.