What About Beauty Pageants?

The Negative Effects of

Beauty Pageants

     Honestly and sincerely, what on earth is the point of beauty pageants? All it does is collect a group of girls, have them compete against each other to determine who is the most beautiful and talented, all mostly based off of physical appearance... or I should say how similar they are to society's expectations of physical perfection. The women who perform in the Miss America pageants are not at all what the majority of American women actually look like. It is an awful lesson to teach women in society that they are only worth as well as they match up to society's standards of beauty. The beauty pageants are overall an entertaining spectacle, however the main focus always seems to be the section where the women display themselves in their swimsuits (these took up a majority of the photos when I was searching for photos to use on this article). An article from the Journal of Popular Culture reinforces this with "although the contest rhetoric, the composition of the parade, and the festival setting were all attempts to make a display of women's bodies respectable, they did not overshadow the fact that the contestants were being judged on how they looked in bathing suits. Even when later pageants added a talent division and gave college scholarships as prizes, the review of the contestants in bathing suits was still the most important part of the competition. Despite pretensions to intellect and talent, physical beauty remained the overriding feature of the ideal American woman," (Watson). With a pageant that derives from strictly physical features, there is no way that anyone could change the meaning of it to try and make it as though it is actually personal and about the lives that they lead for themselves. It is made worse this way because since they are applying these additional "meanings" to these women, women who are watching the pageants are soaking in all of the information on how they can change themselves in order to look like and be more similar to these women who are considered to be perfect examples of the American woman in our society. The Journal of Popular Culture also adds that "The history of beauty contests tells us much about American attitudes toward physical appearance and women's expected roles. Rituals following set procedures, beauty contests have long existed to legitimize the Cinderella mythology for women, to make it seem that beauty is all a woman needs for success and, as a corollary, that beauty ought to be a major pursuit of all women," (Watson). This is an unrealistic ideal of how anyone should live their life, let alone any woman. When a woman is told that all she needs in order to succeed is beauty, she is being set up for disappointment, failure, and ultimately depression, since beauty is always in the eye of the beholder and no one can ever validate what "beauty" itself actually is.

              These types of images of women are displayed everywhere and a competition that focuses on physical "beauty" does not help any woman's cause of getting past the point of feeling like she is worthless since she does not measure up to society's expectations. Naomi Wolf claims that the more these images are forced into a woman's life, "the further it will drive her at the same time down the troubled route of her beauty addiction. And as the experiences along the way become ever more extreme, the stronger will grow women's maddening sense that our culture has a split personality, which it seeks to convey to us through a seductive, embarrassing, challenging, and guilt-laden pro quo between dazzling covers," (Wolf 85). A woman can only be subjected to so much of being told "you need to be _______ to be beautiful" before she completely loses all of her own self worth. The same goes for young girls. How are children supposed to view themselves if their "real" role models, like their mothers and older sisters, are constantly describing themselves as ugly or "not good enough?" Beauty pageants not only have a negative effect on women and our culture, but they are basically the stepping stone for young girls to begin their journey of "improvement" that they will continue to perform for the rest of their lives. However, more on that to come in the next post with beauty pageants and their impacts on young girls! 

Sincerely,

Samantha