Defining Beauty

Beauty pageants, because of their success, hold a great deal of power over the perceptions of those who are in proximity to them.  “If beauty pageants provide a space through which women can realize an experience of embodiment and the possibility of agency, one of the ways they realize this is, ironically, through a particular construction of the female body” (Weiser, 24).  Even the winners of pageants will not suit the standards that crowned them winners forever, indeed not for long at all, despite the age-defying efforts of modern medicine and cosmetic science.

Year after year, Miss Universe continues to remind us of the glorious beauty of diversity” (Birnbaum, 2).  Such propaganda comes directly from the pageant organizers, but a positive spin cannot erase the simple fact that these women merely see a chance to further their own careers through virtue of their physical attributes.  While such a practice might be considered reprehensible by feminists and exploitive of the women who participate in pageants, women like those in Miss Universe are adults who have every chance of realizing what they are making of themselves.