Monday, May 17, 2010

On The New Miss USA






Embroidery by me.


The Miss USA competition is a beauty pageant, should you not know. The pageant consists of women being judged on the basis of their faces and bodies (a swim suit round is included to check out any possible cellulite). The judges determine the most attractive one. She then gets crowned as the Miss USA and also receives various monetary awards and deals.

This year's winner is Rima Fakih, an Arab-American. That made for some odd blog commentary:

Neocon Daniel Pipes sees Muslim women winning beauty pageants and deduces an affirmative action bias -- presumably because no Muslim woman could outshine Judeo-Christian women on the same stage.

I have no idea what Ms. Fakih's religion is and it's not really relevant, because I'm writing of those guy reactions:

Daniel Pipes manages to mash together his support of the objectification of women (yes! sometimes I have to sound feminazi) with his hatred of affirmative action and his fear of the Muslims to get--what? The idea that the judges in those pageants let Muslim women win for political reasons or multiculturalist appeasement or something like that.

And the liberal guys pick up that ball and fly with it! Nooooh! Muslim women really are dishier and prettier than Christian women, and here are the examples!

If you don't believe me, check out this comments thread to a related post.

Note how it all became something about ethnicity or religion and how the gender angle was completely and totally lost? Yet I'm quite sure that this was not on purpose. Women's issues are simply not as visible or as important as all those other issues.

To get those a bit more visible, I'm attaching a picture of the semi-final round of this year's pageant.





Yes, swim suits are always worn with high-heeled shoes.


After reading through this post I decided to add this obligatory statement: I have nothing against beauty pageants! I want to have them for men, too, and they must get the same viewership figures, the same publicity and so on. The swim suit round will have oiled men in tiny G-strings, wearing skiing boots. We can then discuss which of them have silicone something-or-other. And which of them want to work for world peace or cure cancer.