Sometimes it feels like women are making progress.
We get more of us into STEM subjects, the pay gap gets a little smaller. Men no longer freely describe doing childcare as ‘babysitting’. And then you read a statistic that makes you think that perhaps progress is a lot slower than you realised. Glacial, in fact.
More women than ever before have applied to compete in beauty pageants this year. 20,000 women for applied for the most recent round.
In an age of ‘you can do whatever you want’ and ‘the future is female’, young women are still signing up to compete to be the best looking in the eyes of an institution.
It’s a common misconception that feminists object to beauty pageants because they disapprove of women being beautiful. In the most part, this isn’t the case.
Feminism is always and has always been about making your own choice, and if what makes you happy is wearing a bikini and smiling at strangers, then more power to you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being beautiful and wanting to make a career out of it.
The problem with these competitions has always been and will always be, the way that they treat the women who compete. Let’s remember, the previous owner of Miss Universe was everyone’s favourite megalomaniac, Donald Trump. You can read about his ‘[creepy’ behaviour ](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/)whilewhile){href='https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/)while' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'}0/)while incumbent here.
There are more stories than I can count about women who partake in these events beingsexually harassed,bullied and generally treated like meat.
But even beyond the issue of sexual harassment, these events are not friends to women. Time and time again the UK pageant scene has tried to reinvent the wheel, first taking away the bikini round, then making the women compete in a ‘no make-up’ round.
Just as in the 1990’s they tried to change the title from ‘beauty pageant’ to ‘scholarship program’, putting the emphasis on charity work. But these changes don’t make the events more modern, because it is fundamentally unmodern to rank women by how appealing they are to you and then reward the winner with a contract which effectively means that you own her for a year.
How can an institution which forbids women over the age of 27 and women who’ve previously posed topless, from competing, ever be considered modern?
It’s hard to understand why, in the age of social media when it’s possible to make yourself famous by being stunningly attractive and having a winning personality, anyone would want to decentralise their success by selling their soul to a pageant.
As an influencer, blogger or model you’re free to make as much money as you like, work in a way that suits you and generally shape your career around your own needs. As a beauty queen you’re obliged to follow someone else’s schedule, use your beauty to promote their cause, and worse of all you’re bound by their morality clauses. So, if they don’t like how you behave, they can take your crown. In short: they give you the success, and they can take it away.
Probably the most famous previous Miss GB contestant was Zara Holland, who won the crown, then went on Love Island. While on Love Island, she had sex. Because she had sex, the Miss GB team stripped her of her crown. So, it was fine for her to perform on stage wearing very little, but when she actually had sex with someone she liked? That was a step to far.
There is nothing wrong with a woman wanting to make a living out of being good looking. Being beautiful is just as much of a combination of hard work and good luck as being very intelligent is. But what is deeply sad is that women don’t feel empowered to make their success on their own, instead feeling that they need the structure of an archaic institution to do so.
If you want to wear a crown, buy one. Don’t wait for a panel of strangers to decide whether or not you deserve it after you’ve strutted up and down on a stage, trying to win their favour. The best part about buying your own crown? Nobody can take it away if they object to your behaviour.