Pageantry

Last night, while all the cool kids were wrapping up Wiscon, I was working on some code and I was also exposed to the Miss Universe 2005 pageant. (Blame Trish–she put it on).

You may have heard that Miss Canada won the pageant.

I suppose I’m supposed to feel something nationalistic and patriotic about this, but I don’t. Lots of reasons:

1) I never really understood the “our team” thing. If the Halifax Mooseheads (an aside: Americans who think that’s a really funny name might be lacking some context) win a game, I don’t feel like it has anything to do with me, and similarly for any kind of spectator thing where I don’t know people on the team. (The one exception is Canada-US hockey, where I do like to see Canada win. That’s just because while I love many Americans, I hate a lot of things about America, and hockey is supposed to ours.)

2) She’s was born in Russia. Which is not to say immigrants are not Canadians–indeed I could make a pretty good argument that people who choose to live in a country are, by definition, more patriotic that people who happen to be born there. Still, if this is primarily a beauty pageant, and the kind of beauty that pageants reward is primarily genetic in nature, and her genes are all from outside of Canada… (although, good on us for importing such a fine set of genes into the Canadian pool).

3) Donald Trump is behind the Miss Universe Pageant. We hates him. Yes we do.

4) Besides all of that Miss Mexico should have won. (And weirdly, in this photo, she looks exactly like one of the waitresses I used to hang out with back in the day.)

You may be surprised, or not, to learn that I have no real problem with the concept of the beauty pageant, and its intrinsic objectification of women. Given that the rest of the monoculture is so deeply laden with images that constantly enforce a highly sexualized body image, it would seem hypocritcal to place blame on something for openly dealing with these notions. I do get annoyed when they try to pretend it’s not a beauty contest, but rather a scholarship, or whatever, because that is bending knee to that same hypocrisy, but that’s another rant. (If you do find the basic concept objectionable, you might enjoy the Pravda take on it from 2001, which also gets in a good slam at The Donald: “The Miss Universe and Miss World competitions are like cattle fairs, where the world’s male population enjoy, twice-yearly, the institutional right to measure and discuss the female contenders, reduced to the level of a herd of sheep.”)

The other thing that occurs to me watching these girls is that they are… well… girls. The vast majority of the contestants were between 18 and 23. I had already been drunk on tequila before some of the contestants were born! So, once again, I am old. (Thinking about this has revealed that this year, and only this year, the minimum age I could theoretically date down to is the same using either the “half your age plus ten” or “your last girlfriend’s little sister’s age” rules. And it’s older than any of the contestants.)