Beauty Pageants are doing not much but reinforce the commodification of women. A panel of judge analyzes every part of a woman’s appearance as she struts across the stage in a dazzling, mermaid dress scintillating with jewels. She has perfect brunette curls that cascade down her shoulders, a shimmer of highlights under her eyes and a flamboyant color colored in her lips. She wears fake nails, hair extensions, and 6 inch heels. The judges look at her body, her poise, her walking style, her smile, her dress, her hair, her makeup, and all aspects of her except her intellectual abilities.
Despite the fact that most of these women are independent, talented, smart, and determined individuals, the beauty pageants come down to the appearance of these women. The pageant functions to prioritize and emphasize the dress and the model body over any intellectual aspect of the woman. These women are targets of an enterprise that limits feminism into a definition that we struggle so much to break away from.
People argue that now pageants start covering the talent portion or the portion of the competition where these people talk about America’s economic problems or international poverty issues. But if we truly wanted to emphasize the intellectual part of pageants, these women should be actively participating in the world scholar games or quiz bowls, not pageants. Pageants are primarily focused on how pretty the woman is on the stage. But who decides this standard of beauty? Who decides the winner of beauty, when every talent and beauty is unique to each individual?
Pageants seem more of a disgrace to the representation of women as it sets them into a calculating standard based upon their appearance. It degrades down women into looks and judges them by an idealized standard of conventional beauty. The active support and ongoing spread of beauty pageants for even children and teenagers may be the definite culprit of our world’s sexism.
If we are truly for women, we shouldn’t let them be judged by this artificial veneer of pageants. Women are so much more than what they look like on these television shows and we should start showing that.
