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Journalism of Courage
Three cheers for beauty pageants. Three cheers for the Indian winning spirit that propelled Lara Dutta to the Miss Universe title, and Yukta Mookhey to the Miss World crown just a few months before.
Thanks to these subcontinental sizzlers, we can finally understand the concept of beauty with a purpose. How heartening it is that Dutta’s heart in those heart-thumping final hours at Nicosia lay with the millions of hapless Indian women uninformed about the HIV threat. And so this half-Punjabi-part-European stunner spoke not of the string of modelling assignments awaiting her back home, not of the welcome parties by anybody who aspires to be somebody, but of these women. “The majority of women in my country are illiterate and uneducated so we have to start there to educate them,” she declared. “That is what I will do with India and progress to the rest of the world.” Now, where have we heard that before? How many times have we witnessed this Mother Teresa act? Certainly more than the five times in about as many years that Miss Indias have have stirred patriotic instincts with their tiara-sparkly triumphs.
Welcome to the expanding horizons of what have been deemed the lollipop ladies. It’s an evocative term. Revelling in their too-thinness, today’s female icons have a rather uniform silhouette: stick-thin bodies and perfectly sculpted, comparatively larger visages. They are the extreme products of the ornamental culture. As Susan Faludi elaborated in her recent book Stiffed this ornamental culture is defined by "a society drained of context, saturated with a competitive individualism that has been robbed of craft or utility, and ruled by commercial values that revolve around who has the most, the best, the biggest, and the fastest". And the thinnest.
In the advertising age the image is more important than the message, the glamour more enticing than the process. So it is that Naomi Wolf becomes a key advisor to a presidential aspirant, not on the women’s issues she purports to be an expert on, but on how he can rise up to the alpha male image of the current White House occupant.
And so it is that the lollipop ladies become the twentyfirst century’s dispensers of daily wisdom. Home truths are distributed every week, around the world, by the most representative manifestation of self-deprivation, the television character Ally McBeal. And in India, a newly crowned beauty queen’s most onerous task is to give wide-eyed, miniature capsules on how to negotiate life’s many imponderables. Not a word through all of this about the painful visitations to an orthodontist, the identity-blurring romance with silicone-shored pouts, the homogenising sessions with self-styled elocution teachers.
So we are ordered to believe that winning a beauty pageant is supposedly all about inner beauty. Well, their beauty is undeniable as is their hard work to get where they have but it is the iron maidenish parameters they set for millions of young women that are very worrisome. It is the deleterious effect on the self-image of millions of confused youngsters that should temper the enthusiasm that routinely informs the crowning of a new mistress of the universe.
