A beauty contest or beauty pageant is a competition which become popular all around the world. It is mostly based on the physical beauty of all contestants, although such contests often incorporate personality, talent, and answers to judges’ questions as judged criteria. This parade of female bodies is not entertaining at all, because it has nothing to do with aesthetics but in fact reflecting the inequality between the sexes.
These beauty contest are misleading and harmful, not only to plain looking women, but also to the entire community. Pros| Cons| Beauty contests promote an ideal of female beauty to which only a minority of women can realistically aspire, but adding pressure to all women to conform to it. This can be harmful to women by encouraging dieting, eating disorders and cosmetic surgery, or simply by making them feeling inadequate and ugly. | People may enjoy the beauty contests. Many women enjoy entering them.
Many people enjoy watching them. Nobody is forced to do either. The beauty of a fit, healthy, well-proportioned human form is something from which we can all take pleasure and beauty contests, along with other forms of art, are vehicles, which enable us to do so. | Women in beauty contests are judged on their physical appearance rather than on any other qualities they may possess (which is the existence of a ‘talent’ element in many such contests is all very well, but ugly women simply aren’t going to win).
Judging women, but not men, primarily on their looks contributes to the subjugation of women because other qualities such as intelligence, are not seen as part of ideal feminity and there fore, not as things to which women should aspire. | There is nothing wrong with judging people primarily on their physical prowess- people do this all the time in competitive sports, where fitness and strength are major determinants of success.
Every competition or contests, people recognize that being able to lift heavy weights isn’t the prime definition of human worth, but we can still give prizes of weigh-lifting; similarly, we can give a prize to a beautiful woman for her beauty without implying that beauty is all that matters about anyone. | The image of female beauty is often promoted by beauty contests is culturally specific and western- it doesn’t matter how many asian women win miss world, they can still only do so if they take part in the swimsuit ompetition, which may well not be considered appropriate dress in their culture. There were demonstrations against Miss World by feminists and Hindu nationalists when it was helf in Bangalore in 1996. Riots in Kaduna in northern Nigeria over Miss World 2002 left more that 200 dead and led to the contest being moved to London. | Beauty contests, like sport can be an important focus of national or regional pride. Despite the declining popularity of competitions such as Miss World in UK, they hold an important cultural place in many parts of the world.
The victories in recent years of Miss india, miss Turkey and Miss Nigeria in Miss world competitions made many Indians, Turks, and negerians proud, and were seen as symbolic of those countries’ progress in competing with more powerful countries on their own terms. | Beauty contests fail to challenge harmful political attitudes to women. Despite paying lip-service to feminist keywords such as empowerment and self-confidence, they do nothing concrete to aid the livberation of women’ indeed by reinforcing looks as the most important feminie quality, they harm women’s liberationin general.
The fact that the organisers of Miss world 2002 had no problem with holding the contest in Nigeria at the same time as a high-profile case in which a woman was due to be stoned for adultery exposes the competition’s hypocrisy; it was only relocated after rioting made it unsafe to hold it in Nigeria. | In a society in which women really are valued on the basis of their looks, and in which there really are fewer opportunities for women than for men, beauty contests give women a change to get noticed and to improve their situations.
Winning a beauty contest can be a route to success. Many Hollywood actresses such as Halle barry, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sharon Stone are former beauty queens who simply would not have had the opportunities they have had without the beauty contests they won. In addition, the winners of high-profile beauty contests are able to publicise charities and causes they feel strongly about- they have a public platform they could not otherwise have gained. |
