It seems, like everything else, the traditional standards for beauty contests are being undermined. I’ve always thought these kinds of things were a bit iffy to be honest. There’s something more than a little creepy about getting a bunch of women up on stage and judging them for their ‘beauty’.
They tried, I think, to make the whole spectacle a bit more ‘acceptable’ by asking the contestants to share their usually inane thoughts about world peace or some such thing. I can’t criticize the contestants too much here because I often have inane thoughts about things like world peace too, but at least I don’t shove myself into a sparkly dress and try to tell the rest of the world about them. Perhaps I should.
My favourite one (from a while back) was when one contestant, I believe from somewhere in South America, was asked what her favourite food was. Her reply was to the point
“I like penis”
She probably should have learned to say the word ‘peanuts’ a little better before entering the competition.
I understand that Greater Derry has recently hosted one of these beauty pageant things. The winner of Miss Greater Derry is
I admit I thought the initial Tweet in which I saw this had made a typo. I thought this was about the winner of the Miss Greater Derriere competition.
But would you like to play a game of “guess the gamete” here?
It seems the judges here were definitely in favour of peanuts.
Let’s be fair, this contestant probably had something the others didn’t and so rightly deserved the top spot. As one judge is reported to have said “she stood out more than the others”. Another judge was more emphatic; “she just packed more of a punch”.
She was definitely packing something.
Even back in the days when gametes mattered, these kinds of pageants and contests raised, for me, questions about societal attitudes towards women. I never really saw them as a great advert for the empowerment of women but more about objectification. Each to their own, I guess, and some women do seem to enjoy and participate in these kinds of things - so who am I to judge?
But things are definitely getting strange
It’s abundantly clear that the judging, and the fixed smiles of defeat on the other contestants, are a political and ideological positioning; it’s affirmative action applied to pageants.
The actual girls here probably didn’t stand a chance. It’s another example of just how much better men are than women1 - and better at being women too!
Setting aside personal qualms about the morality of these somewhat sordid spectacles, if a trans woman entered one of these contests and won, I would have no issue - provided the judging was applied evenly and fairly (as much as is possible in these subjective visual assessments of ‘beauty’).
But we all know that’s not the case here. We know the win was awarded on ideological grounds. A larger trans person? Gotta be the winner - we can support trans rights and body positivity in one fell swoop.
This continual foisting of absurdity on us is definitely looking more and more deliberate by the day.
Which leads us back to the perennial question; what are they hoping to achieve with all this?
Now, I get that we don’t want to hurt people physically or emotionally for the “crime” of simply being different. I get that we might want a loosening of some of the more oppressive societal shackles that have arisen. I get that old-fashioned attitudes and prejudices can be restrictive and even damaging to certain sections of the population. Inherent in all of that is a desire to protect people and to have compassion. These are good impulses.
But, like the inane responses of beauty pageant contestants (and me) when asked about things like world peace, there’s also a certain level of naivety and innocence amongst the gullible promoters of these modern trends to reshape everything in the name of ‘compassion’.
Safe spaces. Trigger warnings. Microaggressions. Gender self-ID. Health safetyism. Censorship. Systemic this, that, and the other. Words are violence. Silence is violence. Lived experience. The plethora of privilege. Power and oppression . . .
Everything is designed to trigger an emotional and empathetic response. But we shouldn’t forget that our emotions, as valuable as they are, need to be tempered with our rationality - and that, too, is a very valuable thing we have cultivated. Rationality isn’t everything, but neither are emotions, and the two need to be in a healthy balance.
Be wary of appeals to emotion - it’s an age-old manipulative technique that works just as well today as it did thousands of years ago. The modern ‘woke’ are emphasizing emotion above all - even to the point of emoting about how rationality is a tool of “whiteness” and “oppression”. We really need to ask why they’re so keen on this line of attack.
How many more trolls in sparkly red dresses is it going to take before people figure out how they’re being emotionally manipulated?
This is sarcasm - just in case. The tone and facial expression that need to go with this statement can’t be reproduced in an article.
My question is why did these girls even compete with him? They should have protested like crazy or all dropped out. That they even participated and took this photo is a huge part of the problem. Sheesh.
As the mom of a teenage girl, this photo actually makes me want to cry.
ETA: Yes, that was an emotional response.