Firstly it is a shame that in 2024 beauty pageants still exist. Where women are made to dress in a bikini on stage and like shiny objects, they are paraded to win a silly tiara and a sash. What is worse is that the latest beauty pageants have now begun including older women as contestants.
On the surface of it, this appears to be a great inclusion idea and an opportunity for women to showcase their fitness, agility, sharp intelligence and the life they have lead over the years. But what lies underneath this, is an extremely frightening and worrisome new phenomenon of one gender being pitted against one another on a stage, competing to prove to society her desirability at a matured phase of her life. The thought itself is extremely tiring and reeks of sexism.
Funnily these beauty standards and contests do not address ageing men to prove their worth, by wearing skinny pants and tight vests. A bald, paunchy, ageing man who is financially stable has never needed to feel insecure of his appearance. Whereas women are time and again forced to make themselves visible in a world that doesn’t wish to acknowledge her, post her fertile years of existence. She is directly linked to her uterus years and the ability to produce an offspring for the man in her life.
Now the invisibility is being bridged by making her take part in competitions that address a very surface level achievement for women. What these beauty contests are missing to highlight are the true women icons and torchbearers who are ruling countries, running companies and becoming changemakers in their respective nations.
Alejandra Rodriguez, the 60-year-old lawyer and journalist, who is based in Argentina’s La Plata, has been crowned as Miss Universe Buenos Aires. With this win the Argentinian woman is claiming to represent a “new paradigm” of beauty standards in pageants.
Rodriguez has made history by becoming the first 60-year-old to win a beauty pageant. But this maybe the start of a new trend and pressure that women will have to endure, if marketers begin pouring money into brands that will start creating a false ideal of older women in society.
It just may become a matter of time when brands are going to start normalising this abnormality for matured women to win the coveted Ms Universe title.
Ageing for women will become another set of rules that the brand ambassadors will soon set a benchmark for an average women to feel bad about herself. Again another mile stone for older women to win with fitness, pregnancy scars and wrinkles that some may desperately want to smoothen them out, which will make her loosen her purse strings, to go under the knife to join these contests.
In this brouhaha of inclusion who will benefit?
It is obviously the businesses that sell products and goods to a gender that has been paraded half naked since years on a stage where she is the symbol of a country and not an individual. These contests are a regressive reminder of what we don’t want for women.
Beauty pageants should have no place in our future, as women must march shoulder to shoulder with men to become equal contributors to their respective careers and the economy.
One needs to focus that beneath the sparkling crowns and bright smiles, is a sinister darkness of these pageants which focus on the physical appearance of a woman and conform to narrow beauty standards. They continue to reinforce harmful stereotypes and skewed perspectives of a women’s worth in society.
Mohua Chinappa is an author, poet and runs a podcast called The Mohua Show and The Literature Lounge.