by Guest Author CDF of Whirled Peas

Beauty contests have been getting more attention than usual lately. Usually, these rather pathetic events are ignored, left as an enthusiasm for hopelessly insecure young women, who having found no other quality with which to make their mark on the world, hit upon the “Evil Queen from Snow White” formula of finding self worth. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most neurotic-obsessive of them all?

Health and beauty

Don’t forget, these young women essentially torture themselves. They subject themselves to diets which border on starvation; they irradiate themselves either with natural sunlight or worse, tanning beds. In many cases, they have plastic surgeons who make sure their breasts are at optimal perkiness, their cheekbones are sharp enough to use as a hole punch, and their lips are sufficiently loaded with collagen that they appear to have a permanent pucker in place. It is rather a pity in those instances that the surgeons and cosmeticians don’t go up with the pageant winner to accept the award: doesn’t the pit crew deserve an accolade too?

Politics and beauty

We have Miss California to thank for drawing our attention to this swamp of shallowness and trauma. If she had merely said that she was in favour of gay marriage, or if the blogger Perez Hilton had merely dismissed her as an airhead, we would likely have allowed the latest Miss USA contest to pass unnoticed. But thanks to the brouhahaha between these two we have been reminded of this contest’s presence, and the deep seam of psychological issues not just with the contestants, but lurking within the public that allows this competition to continue.

Only in America would the notion of a nearly-naked fundamentalist Christian beauty queen tossing her processed hair and parading brand new pageant-bought plastic breasts across a Las Vegas stage in front of millions of television viewers with all the modesty of a blue ribbon heifer at a county livestock fair (the same fundamentalist Christian beauty queen who would later tell a television reporter that she heard God whispering in her ear as she answered a celebrity-worshipping Internet gossip columnist’s question about gay marriage) be treated as anything other than an occasion for high comedy and mirth.  — Michael Rowe

Fantasy made flesh

We live in an era where some must have every fantasy made flesh. Some want to live in a mansion; up until recently, it was possible even for individuals to buy one, even if they hadn’t sufficient means to pay back the mortgage. Some want to make a lot of money; again, until recently, it was possible to sign up with online stock brokers and try one’s hand at making paper profits. Some want to kill and hurt people; the more sane take up their time with graphic three-dimensional video games, the deeply troubled go on the rampage in schools. There is an urge, hidden but always screaming that demands we become wealthy, powerful, attractive, full of sexual magnetism, and never, ever be satisfied.

In this schema, the beauty contestants are victims of a need for fantasy to be made flesh. They desire attractiveness above all. But what supports that image of attractiveness is the willingness of the public to have them perform as their masturbatory props.

Masturbatory props

In order to explain this phenomena further, it’s worth remembering that all sexual activity has a fantasy element involved. The act is never the act in and of itself; if that were the case, it would become quite absurd in some respects, from the motions involved to the awkwardness of the creaking bedsprings. But it is not just that: there are fantastic qualities associated with it, connected to the imagination: e.g., I look into her eyes and see her soul. Or, this is such a naughty thing we’re doing. Or, this reminds me of this other time which was really good, in which case fantasy is piled on fantasy. We need this component, it is healthy: it is an abstract element which allows a space for thought in a world which if experienced solely through the nerve endings, would never allow thinking in the first place. However, at the same time this element can be warped, if our desires are exclusively trained on trying to turn fantasy into reality.

Sexuality and sensuality

We are constantly bombarded with stimuli which tells us to do precisely that. Men’s magazines, airbrushed, soft focus, or even digitally enhanced, try to portray an image of woman in a certain way: breasts have a certain set of parameters to which they must adhere, face, eyes, hair, all have to fall within a series of measurements. The ideal woman is young, sexually promiscuous, and yet vulnerable to advances of even the most homely man. But perhaps the fantasy space is disturbed by the impossibility of these qualities existing in a single combination, so it looks for substitutions: the young and vulnerable aspects make their appearance in the beauty pageants. The sexual element in this instance is more understated, but inherent. The women in this scenario are not women in and of themselves, they exist solely to fulfill an imaginative outlet, and reinforce the negative psychological feedback loop which suggests that fantasy is there to be realised.

Conscious living

Fantasy can be harmless, and as previously stated, necessary. However, there is a point where it becomes too much to remain unaddressed: that point is where it inflicts harm on the well-being of others. Considering the lives that are blighted by the necessities of this perverse phenomenon, that juncture has already been reached. To address this, the first step is to accept that this outlet is not “normal”. For those who say otherwise, it is considered “normal” in some societies that clitorectomies are performed, yet we in the West refuse to accept this. Normal is thus a relative value: therefore it is subject to revision, and when provable harm is entailed, morality demands it must be changed. Beauty contests should be exposed for the tragic mess that they are, not celebrated in any way; let it be ridiculed, damned, castigated, derided. Perhaps hope also lies in phenomena like Susan Boyle, which is challenging the underlying societal opinion about physical beauty being linked to talent or virtue: they are not. We need more of this in order to challenge and break our own assumptions. We also need more humility, whereby we realise that we are not all going to be pop stars, millionaires or Hollywood actors. We have value as individuals; trying to project that value against the ever variable grid of fame is neither worthy or worthwhile. Posterity should be taught to let it go.

Related post:
Sexualizing young girls