Beauty Pageants: Still Unacceptable?
Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2010 3:17 pm
Vilified to the point of TV extinction in the 1980s for their allegedly non-PC nature, beauty pageants represent a phenomenon which still has the power to make otherwise-intelligent and objective persons shuffle their feet in discomfort. Even today, being asked for your opinion on the subject constitutes being put in the hot seat and no mistake. You feel that whatever opinion you air, somebody will castigate you for being somehow deplorable and/or maladjusted in some way and that you'll either be accused of being something ending in -ist or simply be left feeling ashamed of being a perfectly normal human.
As a teenager in the 70s, I used to feel decidedly uncomfortable sitting through these shows in the same room as my parents and sister - not because I objected to the existence of the phenomenon or had anything against the contestants or organisers, but because I wanted it clearly understood that, whilst I reserved the right to watch the proceedings, I wasn't the sort of lad who treated the show as an oglefest even if other blokes allegedly did. Why shouldn't I watch and enjoy the pageant as long as I did so with the right attitude?
The irony of the situation was that I was of course merely falling victim to my own tendency towards unnecessary soul-searching. My parents and sister couldn't have cared less what was going on in my head while I was watching. They, like most of the members of most of the households in Britain, simply sat down and watched the Miss United Kingdom or Miss World pageants as ordinary light entertainment, in just the same way that they'd sit down to watch The Morecambe & Wise Show, The Two Ronnies or Dad's Army. And nobody ever sounded off the next day about how degenerate the pageants were. After all, the ladies wanted to compete in the contests and the public wanted to watch them compete. Was that really a recipe for the undermining of society?
Now, in the year 2010, our most popular TV shows are those in which contestants from all over the UK compete against one another in various ways in a glamorous theatrical arena - and if some of those contestants are cringe-makingly talentless and/or painfully idiotic, we unfortunately enjoy the shows all the more. The media give saturation-level coverage to the participants, to the point of risking inflicting harm, just as they do to the participants in other reality TV shows. Watching people compete on TV in relatively harmless and even not-so-harmless contexts has become a national fixation and the stuff of everyday life.
So isn't it time TV companies reassessed their attitudes towards beauty pageants? After all, all they ever consisted of were some polite and amiable ladies walking onstage in front of TV cameras and attempting to convince us that they possessed charm as well as looks. There was never the spite, swearing, petulance and overt sexuality we find in today's reality shows - nor was there a trace of the Let's all snigger at the talentless idiot mentality often visible in today's TV talent shows. It was all so very tame, prim, innocent and demure by comparison. So what precisely was there to criticise?
Besides, I suspect that not only would beauty pageants be at least as popular now in the post-Baywatch era as they were in the 60s and 70s, but also that the ladies would be keener than ever before to compete, deluging the organisers at local and regional level with applications because they'd see the contest not merely as the route to a prize and a sash but as a way of significantly advancing their careers and securing work as TV presenters, actors, models, recording artists and so forth. There'd certainly be no shortage of university graduates signing up for the competitions, so the classic image of the wannabe beauty queen with a head full of sawdust would go straight out of the window. And the news media would go into overdrive, scrutinising even the tiniest details of the contestants' lives and creating a whole new rash of freshly-minted celebs each year which the British public would inevitably lap up. Such is the way of things.
In the current TV climate, is there really no room for the return of grace, charm and beauty as an antidote to the brutish ego, swagger and personal folly of talent-show and Reality TV contestants?
I only ask this question as a neutral observer with a fair's fair attitude to life. But I suspect that the inevitable phone-voting could net somebody or other a tidy fortune.
Where's the harm in a return to televised beauty pageants? After all, the pageants are still going on out there, ignored almost completely by the greater world but enduring nonetheless. How schizoid of the broadcasting media is it to continue treating beauty pageants as non-PC and sexist whilst at the same time broadcasting highly sexualised reality shows, pop videos and late-night erotica?
Whatever happened to objective common sense?
Discuss.
(NB I neither liked nor disliked beauty contests myself. I'm simply advocating clear-sightedness and a lack of double-standards.)
As a teenager in the 70s, I used to feel decidedly uncomfortable sitting through these shows in the same room as my parents and sister - not because I objected to the existence of the phenomenon or had anything against the contestants or organisers, but because I wanted it clearly understood that, whilst I reserved the right to watch the proceedings, I wasn't the sort of lad who treated the show as an oglefest even if other blokes allegedly did. Why shouldn't I watch and enjoy the pageant as long as I did so with the right attitude?
The irony of the situation was that I was of course merely falling victim to my own tendency towards unnecessary soul-searching. My parents and sister couldn't have cared less what was going on in my head while I was watching. They, like most of the members of most of the households in Britain, simply sat down and watched the Miss United Kingdom or Miss World pageants as ordinary light entertainment, in just the same way that they'd sit down to watch The Morecambe & Wise Show, The Two Ronnies or Dad's Army. And nobody ever sounded off the next day about how degenerate the pageants were. After all, the ladies wanted to compete in the contests and the public wanted to watch them compete. Was that really a recipe for the undermining of society?
Now, in the year 2010, our most popular TV shows are those in which contestants from all over the UK compete against one another in various ways in a glamorous theatrical arena - and if some of those contestants are cringe-makingly talentless and/or painfully idiotic, we unfortunately enjoy the shows all the more. The media give saturation-level coverage to the participants, to the point of risking inflicting harm, just as they do to the participants in other reality TV shows. Watching people compete on TV in relatively harmless and even not-so-harmless contexts has become a national fixation and the stuff of everyday life.
So isn't it time TV companies reassessed their attitudes towards beauty pageants? After all, all they ever consisted of were some polite and amiable ladies walking onstage in front of TV cameras and attempting to convince us that they possessed charm as well as looks. There was never the spite, swearing, petulance and overt sexuality we find in today's reality shows - nor was there a trace of the Let's all snigger at the talentless idiot mentality often visible in today's TV talent shows. It was all so very tame, prim, innocent and demure by comparison. So what precisely was there to criticise?
Besides, I suspect that not only would beauty pageants be at least as popular now in the post-Baywatch era as they were in the 60s and 70s, but also that the ladies would be keener than ever before to compete, deluging the organisers at local and regional level with applications because they'd see the contest not merely as the route to a prize and a sash but as a way of significantly advancing their careers and securing work as TV presenters, actors, models, recording artists and so forth. There'd certainly be no shortage of university graduates signing up for the competitions, so the classic image of the wannabe beauty queen with a head full of sawdust would go straight out of the window. And the news media would go into overdrive, scrutinising even the tiniest details of the contestants' lives and creating a whole new rash of freshly-minted celebs each year which the British public would inevitably lap up. Such is the way of things.
In the current TV climate, is there really no room for the return of grace, charm and beauty as an antidote to the brutish ego, swagger and personal folly of talent-show and Reality TV contestants?
I only ask this question as a neutral observer with a fair's fair attitude to life. But I suspect that the inevitable phone-voting could net somebody or other a tidy fortune.
Where's the harm in a return to televised beauty pageants? After all, the pageants are still going on out there, ignored almost completely by the greater world but enduring nonetheless. How schizoid of the broadcasting media is it to continue treating beauty pageants as non-PC and sexist whilst at the same time broadcasting highly sexualised reality shows, pop videos and late-night erotica?
Whatever happened to objective common sense?
Discuss.
(NB I neither liked nor disliked beauty contests myself. I'm simply advocating clear-sightedness and a lack of double-standards.)