Beauty Pageant – a Poison to Female?

Cheung Ngai Yik

#T38

Beauty Pageant – A Poison to Female?

Beautiful faces, glaring dresses and pitch-perfect body line. Beauty pageants like Miss Universe are held for women all around the world, to compete in looks, style, and sometimes talents. The industry has been booming since 19th century, the biggest Miss World competition has experienced the hottest date in the TV calendar with the peak audience of 27.5 million viewers, attracted up to 3 billion viewers in 120 countries (Magubane, 2008). Those contests are not only limit to adults, children beauty pageants have also been taking the world by storm. Despite its entertaining nature, it can be harmful, even fatal to female in terms of setting extreme aesthetic standards and encourage judge women by their appearance. This essay will argue that beauty contests are harmful because it adversely affects mental and physical health of different hierarchy of female, and because it degrades women.

The most serious detrimental effect of beauty pageants is the health issue raised by the pursuit of unachievable appearance among women and the ignorant of intrinsic values. Skinny models who have undergone years of diets in pageants have already brainwashed the world that the beautiful people are the thin one. On the other hand, women will take them as a role model, taking up drastic diets and lose as much weight they can to fit the rigor social trend. The lifestyle is undeniably unhealthy and unsustainable, anorexia and other psychological problems will therefore emerge consequently. Also, ABC News states that children are the most rapid growing segment of the beauty contests market (Schultz & Murphy, 2002), which is teaching children that our self-value is measured by how beauty they are and become extremely conscious about outer beauty. It distracts girls from focusing on improving their education, culture and skills at the early stage. In fact, we should let them embrace other parts of their personality and explore themselves out as children are still figuring themselves out at a very tender age. Due to the impact of media-portrayed images of ‘perfect shape’, the health and value plight where girls and women are in is being worried.

There is another issue arises from beauty pageants – the objectification of women. The contests are degrading women as the idea of pageants implies judging women merely on their physical outlook but ignore their individuality. It is distinct that only little judges want to explore contestants’ life experiences, which means that interviewing is just skin-deep and a fraud. The objective is turning women into media objects that can be assessed and some people may even start making fun of the pageant itself. Moreover, the overall message that beauty pageants gives to people is negative. Even men would be more likely to demand their wives or girlfriends to look like beauty pageants after watching those shows. Women therefore react to conduct themselves in a way to please the audience and their partners. It could be observed that women are always taking others’ fancy and living in the shadows. With the increased focus on equality, beauty contests which propagate the wrong attitude are becoming one of the few institutions where women are objectified.

Some articles and opponents of this point of view may argue that beauty contests is not harmful to women at all. Certain objections might include the confidence built in the process and the sense of achievement earned by gaining a prize. Reaching outside their comfort zone, female can be able to portray a high amount of confidence in front of the judges (Toddlers in Tiaras, 2013). However, beauty contests are not similar to dance competition, it involves a lot more psychological torture. As girls are judged by the way they look or smile, it can adversely lower their self-esteem and make them hardly escape from body image shame and harsh self-criticism. The case is especially inappropriate for young children that they are just building self-esteem at the stage. An article states that psychologists say this could dent children’s confidence if they are not judged the best (Critchley, 2010), which is undoubtedly true as stressed and upset will dominate girls when lose the game with just one supreme winner. What is more, beauty pageants have spread the concept that the achievement you reap depends merely on people’s skin-deep appearance, which would not be long-lasting for lifetime when compared to knowledge, talents, and individuality, and finally slip women to the dark side of materialism. Therefore, it is obvious that beauty contest can be dangerous, even deadly for female’s mental health, making them align their life value with error.