This year’s Miss Universe pageant can only be described as an utter disaster. The powers that be picked Steve Harvey as a host – an incredibly inappropriate choice considering his regressive views on women mirror those of an MRA. He then went on to name the wrong winner which meant an awkward decrowning which has already done the rounds as this week’s hottest gif.
Dazed cover star Chloë Grace Moretz reflected on the mess as it happened. “It’s a new time…I think we cut the swimsuit section from miss Universe,” she said. “And on a side note.. They just asked these young women ‘Who’s more boy crazy?’” As a reasonable response to this she decided that if the pageant is to continue, it should be based on interviews, public speaking and “philanthropic tenacity”.
The very fact that Miss Universe continues today is strange considering historically large beauty pageants have been heralded as the epitome of patriarchy and misogyny by feminists since the late sixties. At Miss America 1968 feminists famously burnt their bras and marched with signs outside, then crowning a live sheep to compare the pageant to a livestock competition at county fairs. Yearly it’s the subject of think pieces and articles that criticise its fetishisation of women’s bodies over their minds.
Moretz’s comment is a fair one – perhaps it’s unnecessary to end Miss Universe. But when there’s no male equivalent of the beauty pageants for women on that grand scale and we’re crawling towards gender equality, the competition as it stands looks archaic at best, painfully embarrassing at worst.
