Musician Etcetera is apparently a columnist
with Punch. He discusses critical social issues weekly on Saturday Punch. This week
he is of the opinion that MBGN and other Beauty Pageants should be banned. Lol!
Obviously, Beauty Queens and modeling Agents may not take this article lightly. So
Etcetera take cover, damsels maybe coming for you. Lol!
Find the article after the cut… and tell us
what you think
Every year, thousands of girls compete in
various beauty pageants across Nigeria. While the organisers may believe that
they are helping our girls to feel “beautiful,” they are also in many other
ways causing significant damage to the self-esteem and body perception of other
girls. The girl who won may feel as beautiful as the prettiest woman ever
created, but what about the girls who didn’t win? How do they feel? I spoke
with some past contestants of one of the pageants (the girls that didn’t win)
and asked them why they think they didn’t win, and this is what some of them
said, “Because I wasn’t pretty enough,” “Because the organisers didn’t like
me,” “Because it is a racket and who knows what she has offered,” etc. Things
like this inspire jealousy, low self-esteem, and other self destructive
behaviours such as self isolation, social anxiety, eating disorder, drug abuse,
personality disorder, bitterness and social phobia among our girls.
Beauty pageants in Nigeria should be
sanctioned. Where do we draw the line between “beauty pageant” and
“prostitution?” These pageant organisers and agencies are doing nothing but
exploiting our girls in order to make money. The society is becoming so twisted
and our sense of right and wrong is becoming so skewed. You gather politicians
and paedophiles to watch girls in G-strings and bikinis wriggling their waists
all in the name of making a show for TV. Are the contestants always meant to
lie about their beliefs and relationship status in order to get a good score?
Have we totally lost sight of what is morally right and wrong?
Beauty contests seem pointless to me. To tell
a woman to submit to someone else’s definition of beauty is crazy. So when the
contest is over and someone wins, does that immediately make them more
beautiful than the rest? Are they more beautiful according to a panel of
judges? I think it is a sick idea and the money spent organising these beauty
contests can be more useful for other causes.
Beauty pageant has been nothing but degrading
and harmful to our women and children. It turns our women into objects to be
used and played with. It makes the women that don’t make it through feel bad
about their looks and even those that do get through feel like they still have
to do something more to look prettier. These beauty pageants also set false
standards about how beautiful women are supposed to look. So, just because a
woman is thin with certain looks, it makes them more beautiful? And women that
are thick or big can’t be pretty or beautiful? All they have succeeded in
saying is that beauty is only skin deep. Well my friend, it isn’t.
Isn’t it bad enough seeing young Nigerian
girls forcing eating disorders on themselves just to be perceived as prettier?
‘I am so fat and it is just not healthy’ has become the chorus of every girl on
the street. Parents have become very competitive trying to make their daughters
more beautiful than their neighbours’ by forcing their children to make
unnecessary adjustments to their bodies to look better than their peers. Now we
see six-year-olds having hair extensions, permanent mascara and waxed eyebrows.
Do these children really need to be exposed to such things to know that they
are beautiful? Do we need our children to think that their looks are judged and
if they don’t stand out among their peers, they are not beautiful?
Can a woman ever have a sincere appreciation
of her body when the only time she is ever praised for her looks is after hours
of preparation with dozens of beauty products? Beauty pageants can only judge
what we can see at first glance, and women are so much more than that. The
society needs to protect the children from the sick idea of assembling girls in
camps and tasking them with over-sexualised dance routines. These beauty
pageants can only ingrain into our women that in order to be beautiful, they
need to be skinny, which for some body types is incredibly unhealthy.
Sincerely, what is the moral behind these beauty pageant shows? How have they helped
the society in general? With sports, we can talk about mental discipline,
fitness and advance body control. For all the money that beauty pageants cost
to organise, is it really worth it? Of all the things you could expose our
girls to, are pageants really the best thing out there?
When you teach people that beauty is only on
the outside, it can cause major problems, not only health problems but social,
physical and mental problems also. If a beautiful girl enters a pageant and
doesn’t win, she may begin to consider herself ugly or fat or too skinny.
Beauty pageants create a lot of problems that can affect not only the girl but
the people she surrounds herself with.
Women have always demanded respect from men. Not
only should they demand it, I think they deserve it. But why make them scamper
around in G-strings and bikinis showing off their bodies, knowing that men are
going to go “gaga” and lick their lips. I don’t want to sound disrespectful,
but can you blame the men? Men will always be men. We can’t change our nature,
but you know what we can change. We can change the fact that our women are
naked and competing to be “the most beautiful in the world.” We shouldn’t
endorse beauty contest because it brings money to some people. I believe that
there are still a handful of women out there that share the sentiment that
beauty contests are wrong and give men the wrong idea of what a “true wife”
looks like.Culled: PUNCH
How is it my Biz! hhehehhhe
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