Off With Their Heads

The Google app that comes with Android phones is basically a portal to click-bait, celebrity gossip and low-end lifestyle content. It's rumored that there are ways to train it to serve up items that one finds useful and interesting, but I suspect that they would take more time than I am willing to devote to the project, given my results thus far.

In any event, I was attempting to sift through the banal flotsam that it had presented me, when I came across the "headline" that "Miss Argentina and Miss Puerto Rico reveal they secretly got married." Given the source, I immediately suspected that the headline wasn't all it was cracked up to be; while the implication was that the two beauty pageant contestants had married one another, I figured the actual situation was that they were simply married, and thus had been ineligible for the "Miss" appellation that these pageants require. Something of a scandal in pageant circles, sure, but not really a big deal.

For once, my reflexive cynicism led me astray, and it turned out that Mariana Varela and Fabiola Valentin had married one another. The headline had been genuine celebrity gossip click-bait. The internet was abuzz with stories of the two women. And one of those stories featured this photograph:

Who shows photos of a married couple from the neck down?

Hmm... I wonder who the target audience was?

I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but even I found this to be beyond simply poor taste. Sure, Mesdames Varela and Valentin are attractive women. They were, after all, at one point selected by some or another panel of judges to be among the most beautiful women in their home nation/territory. And there are certainly legions of "thirsty" men (and likely more than a few women) who are desperate for anything they can get of their bodies. But catering to that desperation in this way; by literally reducing the two to their bodies, feeds into an idea that considering their bodies to be the only thing worth valuing about them is legitimate.

To a degree, of course, this is kind of the whole point of the beauty pageant business; holding up a standard of femininity that pretty much begins and ends, with physical attractiveness. But at least the women are allowed to show their faces.

It's the common problem with any sort of attempt to drive social change on behalf of a group of people; self-advocacy is almost always necessary, yet almost never sufficient to bring about the desired end goal. Action needs to be broader than that.

To be sure, the whole story is, in a lot of ways, simply a chance for people to ogle two attractive women, and be titillated by the fact that they're less than entirely heterosexual. Former beauty queens marry all the time; winning national, or international, pageants doesn't come with a contractual obligation to remain single (and thus available for people's fantasies). I don't recall the last time I heard about such an event, let alone having Google decide that it was important enough for one of the very limited slots in their phone app.