Beauty contests

The whole concept of a beauty contest seems a weird leftover from bygone days.

The sole role of a young woman is to look nice and be able to show a pleasant demeanour, and if she wins she can turn up and beautify a number of sponsored events over the years.

Fine but these days you do not need a contest, do you? You can get some smart, elegant female executive to turn up and make the sponsored event successful and you not need worry about how good the product is - she will be capable of getting the required results, right?

The last time that I saw anything on these lines was when Bob Hope got heckled by the "Women's Liberation Movement" at the Miss World contest - checking this morning, I found out that this was back in 1970, or 43 years ago.

That they still have a "Miss World" competition .... OK. In those days it was always held in London. These days it has gone international. Or so I discovered today.

Someone had the bright idea of putting the competition on in Indonesia. Indonesia is primarily a Muslim country - not fanatically so, maybe, but certainly to a point where there are expectations.

That they can even hold a beauty contest in a Muslim country sounds like that they are not that fanatical. That the young ladies can parade around without their heads covered or can talk to men who are not members of their families - OK, sounds relatively advanced.

One thing though that apparently is important. They are going to parade in sarongs and not in bikinis. Bikinis are apparently "no go".

With the best will in the world, I am prone to wonder why not. If this was an integral part of the competition. Just parading round, trying to look "beautiful" is a weird enough concept. And what I remember of the "Miss World" contest back in the days of my youth was that it was absolutely supposed to be about beauty, but nowt sexual .... Times maybe move on. Maybe.

Sexuality in even a small basic area like wearing a bikini (which tend mainly to be worn for comfort in hot climates - plenty of fairly elderly ladies wear them purely for that purpose) upsets Muslims for some reason - which says a lot about the primitive instincts of Muslim men, I suppose!

The point being though - why try to hold a contest anywhere where the rules have to changed just to fit the location? If you have to hold it all?

It has its supporters still. Quite why I do not understand, but anyway - why make a political issue of summat like this. If people cannot live with the standards that you set for your competition, simply take it elsewhere where the guidelines are acceptable.