What happened to the feminist war on beauty pageants?
Thanks to enterprising men, we’re hearing less about 'impossible standards' these days.
A documentary broadcast last year on A&E chronicled former beauty pageant contestants who say they were forced to uphold impossible physical ideals to compete. Eating disorders, drug abuse, and mental trauma were rampant, they claimed, all to maintain that perfect look.
“It was an unrealistic standard to set and it’s an unrealistic standard to maintain,” one former contestant says in the film, titled “Secrets of Miss America”, echoing an argument critics have repeated for decades.
The feminist war on beauty competitions stretches as far back as anyone can remember. In 1970, a leftwing terrorist group bombed a BBC broadcast van outside the Miss World competition in London. The goal was to prevent the pageant from being aired into millions of British homes. Protestors then infiltrated that event and threw bags of flour and rotten fruit at the pageant’s host, Bob Hope. “We’re not ugly! We’re not beautiful! We’re angry!” they chanted. Forty years later, in 2009, more than one hundred protestors gathered outside the Miss University London pageant, where some stormed the stage and set off stink bombs.
Of course, the “unrealistic standards” complaint extends beyond beauty pageants to children’s toys like Barbie and clothing brands. In 2018, lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret found itself in hot water after the company’s chief marketing officer told Vogue that they had no interest in featuring plus-size or transgender models. He resigned the following year and the company attempted to rebrand with big girls on the catwalk—a move that quickly belly-flopped. After a dent in sales, this year Victoria’s Secret quietly reverted to the skinny, angelic beauties for which it had always been associated.
“We are only now beginning to question many of the unfair, unrealistic beauty standards that have been put upon women for decades,” an op-ed by a vexed makeup artist in the British tabloid Metro proclaimed in 2018. “Making women feel like their face should resemble a smooth piece of symmetrical plastic is just as problematic as making us feel like our bodies should resemble the mannequins we see on the high street. It’s unrealistic, unattainable, and dangerous.”
Yet, thanks to enterprising men who continue to upend feminist dogma and abet a protracted cannibalism on the intersectional left, we’re hearing less about those impossible beauty standards. In November, the Miss Universe 2023 pageant featured two transgender contestants vying for the crown, Miss Portugal Marina Machete and Miss Netherlands Rikkie Kollé. Anti-woke social media pundits flew off the handle at this intrusion into women’s spaces yet many missed the more obvious question. After all, if a man can come within spitting-distance, has the beauty standard ever been that unrealistic?
Further influencer meltdown commenced around 2023’s Miss Nepal, Jane Dipika Garrett, the Miss Universe competition’s first plus-size delegate. Commentators grappled with the question: is it worse for contestants to be chubby or to sport a frank-and-two-beans under their sequins, if the latter more closely resembles that “idealized” female physique?
With fats and trans on the catwalk, Lefties offered reluctant praise for Miss Universe’s move toward “inclusivity,” but still called to eradicate such competitions. Yet the “beauty standards” argument has been noticeably absent.
“To watch a revolving door of women be judged based on how well they perform femininity and parade across a stage inevitably feels like stepping back into a distant past in which women were seen but rarely heard,” declared Al Jazeera, of all places. The “attempts at inclusivity are nothing but makeup to hide their ugly realities. It’s time to abolish them.”
If pageants make feminists moan about how they look, fashion magazines have endured as enemy number two. The same people have raised a stink about airbrushing for as long as the technology has existed, using the same “unrealistic standards” argument. But even that fervor has died down, as anyone with an iPhone can now retouch themselves and, undoubtedly, most women don’t want to be shamed for doing it, even feminists.
Still, last August, the New York Times poo-pooed a Vogue cover featuring four 1990s supermodels—Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell among them, all now in their 50s—over airbrushing. “Do Supermodels Age, or Just Get Airbrushed?” the paper finger-wagged in its headline. “The cover of Vogue’s September issue has ignited a new debate about beauty standards.”
Former British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman also chimed in, writing: “Why on earth did they have to be turned into a plasticised version of themselves, dressed in gloomy black widow outfits and run through computer retouching to emerge as a cartoon version of what a glamorous older woman might be?”
Not all cartoon versions of women are bad, according to the intersectionalists. The exalted transgender class remains exempt from criticism. Destroyer of Brands Dylan Mulvaney recently graced magazine covers with an ungodly, critically-high level of airbrushing and Photoshop, rendering his pointy, boyish features and broad frame into an almost entirely AI-generated--some might say impossible--standard of feminine beauty. Why should those editors get a pass, one wonders.
And think of the children. The left continues to die on the hill of “trans youth” but, unlike real girls, sees no reason to shield those children from plastic dreams.