The Manila Times

PAGEANT CONTESTANTS PROVE THEIR BEAUTY IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP

Jaime Yambao

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ECAUSE several of those scheduled last year had been postponed, Filipinos have had more international and national beauty contests to watch this year. Do Filipinos think that too much is being ladled on their plates? Not bloody likely. Beauty contests seem to be in Filipinos’ DNA. They’re in fact very much a part of their culture. From childhood, they witness queens being selected to grace fiestas, and Flores de Mayo and Santacruzan processions. These occasions have religious associations, but in time, they have become more ostentatious, more of an entertainment, circus and fashion show than religious rite, at the center of which is the beauty queen.

It should be no surprise that the Philippines has been an enthusiastic participant of international beauty contests no matter how and why they came about. The first, the Miss World contest, was like a horse race: bets were placed on the likely winners.The second, Miss Universe, served to advertise a bathing suit brand. With their emergence coinciding with the birth of television, live broadcasts of these contests from the beginning have commanded a wide global audience. Depending on where these contests are held from, somewhere in the world people stay awake or rise up early to watch an international beauty pageant.

Filipinos are certainly not alone in their penchant for beauty contests. Ever more countries are sending participants. These contests have themselves proliferated. They must have not only remained profitable but also open to more competitors. Now there are contests referred to as the Big Four, meaning that there are quite a lot of the newcomers. Joining beauty contests has thus become a career for young, comely women. For as long as they have not reached the age limit, they can join the same contest any number of times, and they can try their luck in other contests.

PH a contest powerhouse

After the Philippines came to be among those that have won the most number of these international beauty contests and became known as a “powerhouse” in the game, the training and supplying of the needs of contestants have become a veritable export industry of the country. Foreign beauties are coming to the Philippines to avail of the expertise of Filipino beauty contest trainers and consultants. Among other things, they are taught how to do the “pasarela,” or walk in the contest runway. Contestants from various countries have been wearing evening gowns from Filipino designers. In the last Miss Universe contest held in Florida in the US, all participants wore shoes designed and manufactured by a Filipino and had make-up applied on all of them by a firm owned and run by a Filipino beauty expert and entrepreneur.

Ironically, the proliferation of international beauty contests came about as a response to the criticism of the feminist movement that beauty contests were irrelevant to a world in the throes of war, hunger and inequality, and dangerous because they objectified women or treated women as property and sex objects. Actually, these contests gained more interest among audiences worldwide after proving themselves potentially effective platforms for feminist causes and other causes of value to mankind. These contests are no longer just beauty contests; they have become contests in women’s intelligence and responsiveness to current events and their underlying issues. The question-and-answer portion determines the winner among the finalists. Miss World requires contestants to present a concrete project promoting human rights; those who present the best project automatically become semifinalists. Winners of international beauty contests have a year traveling around the world, visiting projects benefiting children, the elderly, the disabled, and victims of natural and man-made disasters.

It is to the credit of the Philippines that the Miss Earth contest was conceived by a group of Filipinos long before Typhoon Haiyan (Philippine name Yolanda) brought home the dangers of climate change and global warming. No less than the United Nations has recognized the Philippine initiative as a useful contribution to promoting awareness of the need for mankind to protect the environment in its many aspects. Other international contests dealing with the environment have arisen. One, Miss Eco International, is particularly notable because it is based in Egypt, a predominantly and devoutly Muslim country. Like all international beauty contests, Miss Eco International judges choose the most beautiful among its contestants wearing evening gowns and swimsuits that reveal the head and the extremities, or more than a modest measure of skin.

The Egypt-based contest has become more notable because of the return to power of the Taliban. Claiming they’re following the Koran and the hadith, the Taliban believe women should hide their beauty in public and have required them to wear the bukra. The bukra, hitherto a traditional but optional attire, covers a woman’s body, from head to foot with only gaps in the fiber over the eyes to enable her to see. Thus garbed, the Afghan woman typically looks like someone going to a Halloween party dressed as a ghost. The Taliban beat up women who allow so much as a bit of a hand or a foot to slip out of their bukra. Woe to a woman who’s caught with nail polish on her fingers. She is deemed preoccupied with attracting men, and the Taliban immediately chop off her fingers!

Women under Taliban rule

These Taliban practices, according to a woman protester on YouTube, are due to a misreading of the Koran. The Prophet Mohammed did not ask women to hide themselves. What the Prophet did was to ask the men to hide the women to protect them from attacks by lustful travelers and strangers.

Graver crimes against women were committed by the Taliban during their first time in power as a result of picking verses in the Koran and interpreting them outside of the Holy Book’s general precepts on the respect for human life and equality of all human beings. Based on their belief that the only role and function of women is to deliver and take care of children. The Taliban banned the employment and education of women and girls. One can imagine the hardships the ban on employment brought to the many widows of men killed in the endless wars Afghanistan had gone through. There is the story of a woman who donned men’s clothes and pretended to be a young man to find a job and money to buy food for herself and her children. It was good the US invaded Afghanistan before her disguise was discovered. The Taliban required men to grow and keep beards. The greatest accomplishment of the government set up after the US invasion was the restoration of women’s rights to education and employment, including the holding of high public office.

The Taliban have announced that they would be more moderate this time and women and girls would continue to be educated and work. Realities on the ground tell a mixed story. Thousands of Afghans are not waiting for the Taliban to prove they are true to their words. They are not taking chances and are fleeing the country in droves. A refugee has compared the Taliban’s retaking power to an attack of the zombies in the movies.

Protests and boycotts

Beauty contests and their participants are certainly no stranger to controversy. In the last Miss Universe, Miss Myanmar stole the national costume part of the show by wearing a tribal dress and raising a sign saying “Pray for Myanmar,” in protest at the military takeover in her country. A boycott movement led by netizens from the Philippines and South Africa and other countries which don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel, is brewing over the choice of Miss Universe organizers of Eilat, Israel, as the next host of their pageant.

The boycott movement is driven by the crime against humanity of apartheid reported to have been committed by Israel against Palestinians by the international experts in international law of Human Rights Watch in their lengthy and detailed paper available online. The report says that the acts of Israel have crossed the threshold from which they have fallen under the definition of apartheid by international law, including in particular the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, as a crime against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic aggression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” A netizen from the Philippines in the boycott movement observes that Miss Universe which claims to provide a platform to empower women is legitimizing “the apartheid regime in Israel that continues to displace and slaughter Palestinian women.”

The present campaign is reminiscent of the boycott by the Philippines against the apartheid in South Africa the Miss World pageant of 1976 and 1977 because the contest allowed South Africa to send two contestants, one white and one black. The Philippine government through its embassy in London asked Miss Philippines Joy Conde to withdraw from the finals of Miss World. The Miss Philippines of the following year, Peachy Veneracion, was asked not to proceed to London. It was a sacrifice for the two because they were both considered strong candidates for the crown. Either one could have been the first Filipino woman to become Miss World. But their sacrifice was not in vain. It created a stir in the world press. From 1978 to 1990, South Africa was banned from the Miss World contest.

Hopefully, the Miss Universe organizers will heed the demand of the netizens to move the venue of the next pageant somewhere else. They might not do it because Israel is so far the only country in the world that has achieved herd immunity. In that case, the absence of just a few countries could be made to be so felt by Israel that it might stop ignoring the many resolutions in the United Nations and the opinion of the international community asking them to stop the commission of apartheid against Palestinians. There is a strong batch of women vying for Miss Universe Philippines and the winner might be making a similar sacrifice that Misses Conde and Veneracion made in 1976 and 1977. At the very least, she would be proving that like them her beauty is truly more than skin deep. Long live beauty queens!

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2021-09-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://digitaledition.manilatimes.net/article/281543704058099

The Manila Times