Sunday, August 5, 2007

WOMAN AND PEAGANT

Only last day, Miss Indonesia Peagant overed and another "lucky" Indonesian women received the privelege to be awarded the most beautiful woman in Indonesia. Apart from the controversies surrounding it, this kind of peagant has become media to promote tourism and culture of the country concerned. And this year, Putri Raesmawati of East Java had won the place in the exclusive group of Indonesian women.


But is it really necessary to have this kind of competition among women? Most feminists may say "NO" and even for them who do not really believe in feminism movement may say the same thing.

From its history, beauty peagant was started in the USA in 1921, with the goal to give scholarship for women. But from its sponsorship history, by Catalina Swimsuit, the peagant just looked like a swimsuit competition up till 1950 when the peagant official made the swimsuit as the less important part of the competition (http://wikipedia.org). so, just like shoap opera which got its name from its sponsor, fortunately this peagant did not assumed in the same way.

In case of Indonesia, there is no swim suit section of the competition because culturally, Indonesia will reject this peagant as soon as it put swim suit comptition as its main event.

In his book "Sarinah", the first Indonesian president, Soekarno, classified this event as women movement in the first catagory where women are more give the important of their physical beauty. Even this competition promotes their jargon,3B (Brain, Behaviour, Beauty) but in reality the most important of the three is beauty.

Women are not yet enlighted in this event. In most cases, they are the objects in the competition. We can see from the configuration of the judges in each competition in every country, almost 75% of the judges are men. And, naturally, their judgement will be affected by the physical beauty of the contestants. And this means that their intellectual and behavioural talent are the side value of the judgement.

In the last few decades, every element of world community tries to promote gender equality and in its process, a lots of resources have been spent. In this equality, women and men should be judge by their capacity and ability, not by their physical superiority or incapabality. But in an event where physical appearance take the most important, it seems that the effort to promote equality becoming useless.

Of course, we can argue that it is women's right to choose to take part in the competition, by economical, principle, or popularity reasons. but by the end we can see that not much of benefits can be achieved in the event apart from the promotional value for sponsors of the event. And by this reason, women become the object of commercialism of their beauty.


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