Contestants competing in the Miss Peru 2018 beauty pageant were supposed to take the stage and recite their body measurements for the judges and the audience.
Why this still happens is beyond me.
Beauty pageants of all kinds are sad, disgusting vestiges of a sexist, patriarchal world that saw women as objects of beauty rather than people of equal or better worth. They are the kind of thing that a man like Donald Trump would own.
But just imagine having to parade in front of judges and an audience and announce your measurements like you’re a piece of meat. It’s as if they are trying to make the beauty pageant as disgusting as possible.
However, in this instance, these women ignored this ridiculous, demeaning requirement and instead took the opportunity to highlight a statistic related to violence against women in Peru.
“My name is Karen Cueto, and I represent Lima, and my figures are: 82 femicides and 156 attempted femicides this year.”
“My name is Juana Acevedo, and my figures are: More than 70 percent of women in our country are the victims of street harassment.”
Watch the video. It’s an inspiring moment.
I wish that the Miss Peru contest didn’t exist. I wish the female contestants would boycott the pageant altogether. I wish advertisers would refuse to support the pageant and audiences would refuse to watch. I yearn for the day when we look upon beauty pageants in the same way we look at a time in American when women weren’t allowed to vote:
Archaic, ridiculous, sexist, and demeaning to women.
But if these pageants must exist, I can’t imagine a better way for women to take back a small part of it for their own purposes.
