What is the first thing that impinges your mind when you hear the word beauty pageant? Is it the glamour world or the sparkling jewel crown or is it just about the perfect figures of the models.

The concept of beauty pageant began in 19th century. Symbolic kings and queens were chosen in Europe for May Day and other festivities in which beautiful young women emblematized their nation’s virtues and other abstract ideas. At the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, a re-enactment of a medieval joust and revel was held in Scotland in which many distinguished guests took part and which gained much public attention at the time – a Queen of Beauty was chosen.

Beauty pageants have come a long way since then and have attained immense popularity in all these years. They are accounted as one of the most prestigious events and people look forward to it with great zeal and fervor. The biggest, Miss World competition, has been running annually since 1951, and attracts an enormous worldwide audience – around 3 billion viewers in 115 countries. The beauty contests transpire for various categories of age, sex and sexuality, the focus being the adult women’s beauty contests as overwhelmingly the most popular and high profile version. Beauty pageants are generally multi-tiered and popular, with local competitions feeding into the larger competitions. The worldwide pageants, thus, require hundreds, sometimes thousands, of local competitions. The typical perception of a beauty pageant is that it occurs once a year has women of petite frame, the event is live on stage, and that a talent is involved somehow.

The women parade on stage; the judges apprise a number of perspectives, foremost being the physical artistry. Beauty contests promote an ideal of female beauty to which only a minority of women can realistically aspire, but which adds to the pressure on all women to conform to it. This can have adverse consequences on women as it encourages dieting, eating disorders and cosmetic surgeries among them. This may also make them feel inadequate and ugly.

One cannot ascertain beauty to be an adjective. Rather it can be entitled as an abstract noun which does not have a definite form or meaning. One can just feel it and admire it and it is, of course, human dependent. A person looking beautiful to one may not be beautiful to another. This is a globally accepted strategy.

A person cannot be beautiful as they estimate just by having a right shape and correct pose. Shape and arrangements are as per nature’s ordering. None of us has mere right to estimate the power of creation, the nature. By selecting, that one has beauty what is that we intend to do. Do we praise the nature for only one who won or abuse it for all the others who lost?

Women in beauty contests are judged on their physical appearance rather than on any other qualities they may possess. The existence of a talent element in many such contests is all very well, but ugly women simply aren’t going to win. Judging women primarily on their looks contributes to the subjugation of women because other qualities, such as intelligence, are not seen as part of ideal femininity and therefore not as things to which women should aspire.

The Study

A study has proved that 1 per cent of female adolescence have anorexia. That means 1 out of every 100 young women between the ages of 10 and 20 are starving themselves to death. 9 out of 10 girls age 14 and 15 claim to have suffered depression with 6 per cent saying life just is not worth living. Top sources of what produced this feeling was pressure to look good, that’s 94 per cent of our girls trying to fit into the beauty queen image. Low self-esteem is becoming a crisis in this country. Who is to blame? Beauty pageants are guilty because of what they promote.

Striving to be a beauty queen is a danger to the physical and mental health of our young girls today. The image of female beauty promoted by beauty contests is culturally specific and western – it doesn’t matter how many Asian women win Miss World, they can still only do so if they take part in the swimsuit competition, which may well not be considered appropriate dress in their culture. A number of Asian people consider western-style beauty contests as immoral, because the female participants are typically not dressed modestly. This really degrades women in the eyes of a conservative society.

There were demonstrations against Miss World by feminists and Hindu nationalists when it was held in Bangalore in 1996. Riots in Kaduna in northern Nigeria over Miss World 2002 left more than 200 dead and led to the contest being moved to London.

Beauty contests fail to challenge harmful political attitudes to women. Despite paying lip-service to feminist keywords such as empowerment and self-confidence, they do nothing concrete to aid the liberation of women; indeed, by reinforcing looks as the most important feminine quality, they harm woman’s liberation in general. The fact that the organizers of Miss World 2002 had no problem with holding the contest in Nigeria at the same time as a high profile case in which a woman was due to be stoned for adultery exposes the competition’s hypocrisy; it was only relocated after rioting made it unsafe to hold it in Nigeria.

With the beauty pageant being such a well-known event that has branched out into many parts of society, the effects of this event should now be apparent amongst the general populace. While there is no doubt that these pageants have opened doors for some women, allowing them to use their influence to provide good role models and support their causes, the sometimes little noticed side effects often have a greater effect. We can conclude that the narrow-minded standard of beauty set by beauty pageants is harmful to society in general, and definitely not worth the small accomplishments that come out of them.