Beauty pageants and fake bodies.

While drinking my saturday morning coffee and perusing the internet for my information to fuel my mild hysteria, I came across this article on the Huffington Post. It is titled, Miss California's Breast Implants Funded By Pageant: Confirmed and features an interview transcript between Early Show anchor Maria Rodriguez and co-director of the Miss California pageant Keith Lewis. Don't even get me started on why beauty pageants are so wrong but this interview takes it to a new low. Lewis admits that his organisation funded implants for Miss California so she would feel better about herself. At this point my coffee nearly came out my nose. Aren't there better things to be worrying about? Like what happens when there is a backlash against beautiful people and this woman can't get a job in the 'real world' because she doesn't have any practical 'life skills', all because she spent too much time smiling in the mirror at her vaseline covered teeth and not enough time worrying about education? Now you may think I am being unfair, perhaps beauty pageant participants do have brains... somewhere... Sure but if they really wanted to save the world, cure poverty and end world hunger wouldn't they be better off putting their brains to actual practical use and joining a think tank?

But let us consider for a moment what the greater cultural significance is here. Women are constantly bombarded with media images that supposedly 'accurately' represent women's bodies. They are on TV, in magazines, on the sides of buses; we are over-saturated with them. How will this impact my daughter as she grows up? How will she learn to differentiate between real and plastic and between brains and looks? And I mean aside from what her mother will be teaching her, I am just one woman here people! My mother taught me that bodies come in all shapes and sizes but that still didn't stop me from going through periods of hating my body. I mean seriously, we all need to sit down and re-read John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1971). He argues that through out art history women have been stylised for the pleasure of the male gaze and that a woman is taught to survey herself with that gaze. Nearly 40 years later and I have to say, I don't things have changed that much. Where are all the feminists when we need them?