Should beauty pageants still be a thing?
Since a few days ago the delegates from all over the world have been flying to the USA for this year's Miss Universe competition, coming from Venezuela has always affected my vision of such things because here we magnify pageants, in fact a big parte of the countries budged goes for those. I did some research and there are still 4 big beauty pageants in the world: Miss Univers, Miss World, Miss Internacional, and Miss Earth. So, I started to wonder in 2021 should beauty pageants still be a thing?
Let's start from the very beginning what makes our beauty? is it what's inside us as our feelings, qualities, what we do to help others or it's what's on the outside? our face, body, hair... for some people it could be one of the options or both, but what we stand for nowadays is that no matter how we are there's beauty in all of us. But beauty pageants don't just judge beauty, some of them evaluate what talents does the person has (Miss universe doesn't do this), among other qualities as manners, speech, and culture. Recently pageants starting to develop more of the profile of the delegate as to what are her hobbies, her career, social work and charities, and so on. Swimsuit and nightgown competitions are mandatories.
On the other hand, as those pageants are HUGE in ratings they are a good form to show the world a countries culture, especially through the typical costume competition, which is elected by voting online. They also have been evolving and being tolerant and open, trans women have been accepted for almost a decade and there are also LGTBI+ members delegates. Some testimonies said that beauty pageants help with women's empowerment and discipline.
But if they seem to be not as bad, what's wrong with them? Well, in my opinion, the problem is standardized beauty, as I said before. Beauty pageants even in 2021 stand for the beauty represented for a tall, skinny woman who has long legs (don't get me wrong these woman of course are beautiful) and this is not only the organizations or judges, some people EXPECTS this, a few years ago, Canada sent a delegate which compared to the other women seemed "chubby" and the worst critics came from the public. There's also another problem as the swimsuit is a mandatory competition some cultures as the Islamic prefer not to compete and I think this is quite discriminative because if you want to judge a delegate's modeling you can judge it by the nightgown competition or in other runaways competitions that friendly for all the cultures. I'm not talking here about age competition because there are worldwide competitions for all ages.
In conclusion, beauty pageants should be a thing still in 2021, because they starte to appreciate women as a whole entity and not just jugde her "beauty", but they still need to evolve to the new beauty standards, to not be discriminative, and eliminate competitions that are not considerate to all the cultures.
What's the opinion in your country about beauty pageants? let me know in the comments, thanks for coming this far, I hope you enjoyed reading. Bye!
