While the New York Times mentions the importance of women for development and the Spanish newspaper El País writes about the awful positon of women in Afghanistan, miss Venezuela wins the Miss Universe elections for the second time. This whole miss-business seems a folly to me. The girls often are university students, part of the contest is answering questions, in order to ‘prove’ that it is not a cattle fair, I suppose. But in the end it is all about looks and measures and it is humiliating. I don’t understand how a university student can come to the decision to participate in a miss something contest. I also think that no woman should ever participate in that circus, because we already came to the conclusion that women have lots of abilities outside the household and beauty, didn’t we?
So why on the one hand state that women are important for development and want them get out of their burqa and on the other hand help them into a tiny bikini? As I wrote in my first blog on women in Colombia and Afghanistan I think that it is part of the same way of thinking on women. They are a sexual object. Only the consequence is different. One part decides to hide her from the world and the other wants to show as much as possible of her.
I plead for an abolition of all beauty contests and full attention to improve women’s position in the whole world. That doesn’t mean that physical beauty is not important, but let every woman and every man decide for themselves what they like about women or men. 90-60-90 hardly exists, so why bother about this and feel frustrated? Let us not impose measures.
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