The Most Beautiful Day On Earth

This is something I wrote for that opinion paper required from us by our History II prof about current social changes. Supposedly the immediate thing that would come into our minds would be that of issues regarding the homosexuals and their kind, but I knew that most of my classmates would be using that already.

Just when I thought that I’d be having a hard time coming up with a more different topic to write about, I suddenly thought of a time before the UP College of Nursing Tea Party when someone told me to imitate Riyo Mori’s gown during the Ms. Universe if I were to cosplay Tomoyo as how she appeared in Tusbasa Chronicles.

But a lightbulb appeared on top of my head, my neurons started firing, and the rest is history.

The Most Beautiful Day On Earth

Many say that the essence of being a woman is having children to complete her own family. Others are more career-oriented, saying that women are powerful and capable of taking the lead. So many definitions and so many perspectives yet one thing never fails to come up in what people think a woman is: A woman is beautiful.

The common notion of a beautiful woman is someone who’s capable of turning heads with her pleasant facial features and body contours, one who can easily earn a slot in big time beauty contests. It is believed that these slender women parading onstage in their most glamorous gowns embody the “ideal” beauty that almost every woman could only dream of having.

However, in the long-concluded Ms. Universe 2007, which television commercials dubbed as the “most beautiful day on earth,” several Mexican citizens held their own rally simultaneously with the pageant in order to show their dismay over what they call “exploitation of the female kind.” Ms. Switzerland has also withdrawn from the said pageant due to her country’s same belief. Several similar instances have occurred in past major pageants due to the same reason until such time that some countries and feminist groups actually proposed banning beauty contests once and for all, like what Kenya did back in 2003. The country believes that its women should be used for the enrichment of their culture and not for such “exploitative activities.”

I’ve always believed that beauty pageants are nothing more than a waste of money that otherwise would have been put to more reasonable use. They are mere reinforcements to society’s superficial concept of beauty—that a woman has to have a curvy body, big breasts, a towering height, fair complexion, and a face that’s easy on the eyes in order to be called beautiful. No matter how these pageants try projecting their contestants as well-rounded beauties with brains, it’s still highly ironic how their question and answer portion seems to be a big, dumb joke where the women say anything but the answer to their question. It’s no wonder then why so many women aspire to become one of those ladies whose idea of achieving world peace is through wearing their crowns and waving at cameras whenever they can—because that is the kind of woman they were made to believe in, the one being portrayed time and again.

I personally support the movement for banning beauty pageants not because it is an act of exploitation, but because no significance could be acquired from holding, joining, and winning one. One does not have to be a beauty queen in order to be a role model. One does not have to have a beauty title in order to help Africa’s children. One does not have to wear crowns and sashes to save the environment. One does not have to learn to catwalk for someone to fall in love with her. What then is the importance of beauty pageants? Those competitions aren’t the ultimate determinant of who is beautiful and who is not, for beauty is such an abstract concept unfit to be limited to what the eyes can see and to be subjected into something as impartial as a contest.

Beauty pageants do more harm than good, and although established social beliefs are very hard to repeal, it is very satisfying to know that there is an increasing number of people who are now seeing the more practical and important side of beauty and women that needs more attention.