Sorry, Lara, your crown isn’t so cool

In Britain, beauty pageants have been described variously as "tacky and naf". The beauty business that judges women on the firmness of their breasts or the roundness of their buttocks, and by asking them such taxing questions as what would they like to do about poverty and AIDS is considered "from another era".

Recently beauty pageants have caught media attention in Britain because there was controversy involving the winners. For instance, last year Miss Great Britain was stripped of her title because it was discovered she was a mother. The fact that a woman cannot enter a beauty contest because she had had children was seen as a sign of how removed from reality this business is.

The other event that made a beauty pageant news was when the British entryfor the Miss World faced the axe because she had been photographed topless.The press overwhelmingly cried out against the hypocrisy of this. Beingtopless, they said was not very different from Miss World’s "modern" addition: Contestants have to play beach volleyball in bikinis.

Although Miss World was held in Britain last year, and over a million peoplewatched it on TV, there was no question of the government feting its winner or the media proposing that she was going to end world poverty.

It was mass entertainment at par with the spoof fighting show Gladiators, in which grown up people batter each other with giant ear-buds, or the bizarreAmerican adventure series Xena the Warrior Princess. The programme wasbroadcast by Channel 5 (C5), a TV station whose standard programming includes third-rate American serials, B-grade Hollywood films and soft porn.

Lisa Grainger, features director of women’s magazine Elle, says that thefact that the programme was broadcast on C5 "indicates that the population of Britain does not want it on mainstream TV". She said it was not surprising there was an audience for it "after all there is a market for page three girls (nude pin-ups in tabloid newspapers)…The majority of people here see beauty pageants as only slightly more up-market than page three…The contest organisers say the girls are intelligent…have degrees ..but they still have to be beautiful to succeed…just like to be a page three model, the main criteria is a good pair of boobs".

Rekha Prasad, deputy women’s editor at The Guardian, says that Miss World and Miss Universe are seen, in the West, as "retrograde.. half a joke ..like the Eurovision song contest". They are associated with "something very negative about gender and it is therefore unacceptable to celebrate it".

Sarah Hartley, commissioning editor Femail, the women’s section of theDaily Mail, says that beauty pageants are "completely tacky .. sexistthings". She said women did not want to be judged on "looks, vital statistics…superficial attributes that they are born with".