Beauty Queens and the Capitalist Beast

Vijay Prashad

All the men are computer programmers, all the women are beauty queens, and some of us are humorless. So it seems in the land of Silicon(e) India. Bill Gates says that Indians are the second smartest people on the planet, and the international consortium of Beauty Contests deems Indian women to be the most beautiful. Gates wants us to work in his computer monopoly, so he flatters us with technical complements. The megaliths that salivate before the Indian market (the size of France, we are told eagerly) complement the Indians by saying that we too should overconsume nonsense that makes us look like our Beauty Queens. The H1B visa quota has been increased to 300,000 per year, to encourage more of us to apply to work as cyber-coolies. Simultaneously, Lara Dutta won the Miss Universe title (May), Priyanka Chopra won the Miss World crown (November), and Diya Mirza took home the Miss Asia Pacific honors (December). Flattery opens markets and encourages labor to toil along in the service of a benevolent white supremacy.

Beauty Pagents have a long history in the US, but their role as the purveyors of overconsumption on the international stage is less well known. Founded right after World War II, the Miss Universe pageant is the junior partner to the Miss World contest. The latter was created by Eric and Julia Morley in 1951 as a promotional device for Mr. Morley's company, Mecca, which is what he called a 'leisure group' (travels, entertainment, etc., all at a high price). In 1970, Mrs. Morley coined the phrase 'Beauty with a Purpose' and they took what was essentially a parochial British television event to the world stage. The Miss Universe contest, in comparison, was much smaller and has remained far less prestigious until CBS television and Donald Trump took over the enterprise in late 1996. Before the early 1990s, the Miss Universe pageant was as 'Universal' as the US baseball championships that are called the 'World Series.' CBS-Trump took the pageant into the age of neo-liberalism, in direct competition with the UK's Miss World. It is funny, therefore, to hear Trump on the contest: “there is nothing to compare with the Miss Universe Organization. We have a rich history of bringing together some of the most impressive, beautiful and interesting women from many backgrounds and cultures and then helping them achieve their goals.” Miss World makes the same claims.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, US capital and its media outlets have been on a global binge. The reach of the US (and Australian, viz. Murdoch) media is now quite long and there is a move from many of these outlets to extend their market share in places like India. CBS-Trump's Miss Universe pageant conceived of something called 'Big Event Television,' a hugely promoted event that draws a large audience who will then be turned-on to ancillary programs through expensive advertisements. There are a host of promoters who sign-up eagerly to show their products to a world for which these pageants have become something of an opiate, the Bread and Circuses of current capitalism.

It took the structural adjustment of India (from 1991) to bring forth the crowns of beauty onto the svelte elite women of India. After all, Indian models are no strangers to the winner's circle at the pageants. In the Miss World pageant, the first Indian model to win was Reita Faria in 1966. Six semi-finalists and finalists ('70, '72, '75, '78, '80, and '91) followed her. At the lesser Miss Universe, six semi-finalists and finalists ('66, '72, '73, '74, '90, and '92) forged the path for Sushmita Sen's victory in 1994. But the victories have come fast and furious in the 1990s. In 1994, Sen and Aishwarya Rai won both pageants. Since then, the Miss World pageant has been won by Diana Hayden (1997) and Yukta Mookhey (1999); in 1996, an Indian model was a finalist. On the Miss Universe side, Indian finalists and semi-finalists have stood nervous until the final stages of the contest each year (1995-1999) until the clean sweep this year. The 1990s did change the tempo, perhaps to let us know that global firms wish to project to the Indian consumer a vision of beauty, the advance guard not only for beauty products, but also for the entire consumer goods industry (the creation of desire transforms luxuries into necessities).

Not only is this good for the global firms, but it is also something that is enjoyed by bourgeois nationalists. Sushmita and Aishwarya saved India from the Surat plagues and riots of 1994. Now Lara Dutta saves India from the drought. Foul images of the Third World are erased by doctored images of radiant women. Reality can be easily occluded by big event television. After Ms. Dutta's victory, Femina's editor Sathya Saran wrote in <The Economic Times> that 'today, reality has overreached the dreamI The country is proud, happy. But not surprised.' Utter drivel. The country is still in the midst of a drought that effects 100 million people, at the very least. And most of the 'country' had no idea that this graduate of St. Xavier's (Mumbai) spent the last three weeks in war-torn Cyprus as part of a campaign to revive the tourist industry on that island (Cyprus spent $7 million on the effort).

One reason feminists and other leftists across the world are unhappy with the pageants is that they act as a screen against the war against women conducted by such agencies as the IMF. This is apart from the issue of the degradation of women by the pageants (the reduction of woman to mere body, etc.). In Nicosia, protests outside the basketball stadium (decorated like a Greek amphitheater) ensured that we not forget the trials of the world as we celebrate this shallow kind of universalism. A banner proclaimed that 'we want schools and hospitals,' knowing full well that there are choices to be made in the world and a victory for India at the pageant does little, for example, for its enduring crisis of education and health. One Cypriot woman dressed in rags and carrying black garbage bags told the press that 'I'm a teacher and we have to beg for handouts and we are wasting money here on this pageant. Why?' Indeed, why? Simply to promote a set of values (consumerism) that seem to be far more important to contemporary capitalism than social justice and ethical conduct.

The protests put the pageant on notice. For this reason, the final question asked to the contestants was 'what would you say to those who condemn the contest as an affront to women?' Lara Dutta's answer appealed to the judges: 'pageants like Miss Universe give us young women a platform to foray in the fields that we want to and forge ahead, be it entrepreneurship, the armed forces, be it politics. It gives us a platform to voice our choices and opinions and it makes us strong and independent as we are today.' Of course Ms. Dutta is entitled to her own opinion, but what is of interest is that she chooses these three options: business, the military and politics. Money, the Gun (or Nuclear Bomb) and Power. Of course her father, to whom she dedicated her victory, is in the Indian armed forces. But one can still muse over these 'choices and opinions,' especially how divergent this view of the world is from that of the All-India Democratic Women's Association or of Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia (whose recent bus trips between India and Pakistan are a landmark of people-to-people diplomacy).