December 10, 2002
Kamloops Daily News



Her remarks were reported in newspapers around the world but
there was no rioting in the streets.  Ms. Francoise Ducros,
Prime Minister Chrétien's aid, called the leader of the
world's hyperpower a moron but no one was killed.  It was a
careless and stupid remark but Ducros was the only casualty
-- she lost her job.

Not like when a Nigerian newspaper reported that the Prophet
Mohammed would have approved of the Miss World beauty
pageant being held in that country.  Then all hell broke
loose.

The newspaper office was torched, despite an apology from
the newspaper.  More than 200 were killed, 500 were injured,
4,500 left homeless in Kaduna and the rioting spread to the
capital, Abuja.

Talk about the power of the press.

What's going on here?  There is obviously a radically
difference in perception of beauty pageants between the
Islamic and western worlds.  The western world views beauty
pageants as anachronistic fluff.  Muslims view them as an
affront to public decency -- something like we view child
pornographers.

Part of the difference is that feminist viewpoints have been
integrated into Western society.  Beauty pageants are quaint
because they portray women in exhibitions that ignore the
advances made by social activists.

For example, we no longer regard women as chattels or
possessions of men.  Yet beauty pageants parade women the
way that cattle are paraded at an auction.  We assume the
right of women to vote but it was a right hard fought for.

One such social activists was Emily Murphy, a leader of the
suffrage movement in Canada.  She became a police magistrate
in Edmonton in 1916, the first woman magistrate in the
British Empire.  In 1917, she helped women gain the right
to vote, although they could not run for office.

You can imagine Murphy's chagrin, when a lawyer before her
court claimed that Murphy was not fit as a magistrate
because she wasn't a person.  It was true.  In 1916 women
were not legally persons.

This insult led Murphy to campaign the Privy Council in
Great Britain in the Persons Case, which finally resulted in
women being given the legal right of persons under Canada's 
BNA Act in 1929.

The second wave of feminist activism was lead by activists
Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem in the 1960's.  It was a
reaction to years of stereotyping of a women's place as
being exclusively in the home. It resulted in many women
entering the workforce. By 1984, sixty per cent of women
over the age of sixteen were working.

With the Islamic view thrown into the mix, there is a wide
diversion of opinion.  Even those on the same side of the
issue disagree.  Western social activists don't like beauty
pageants because they are poor role models and out of sync
with modernity.  Fundamentalist Muslims see them as morally
offensive.

Those who favour of beauty pageants include the contestants
and their organizers.  The contestants see themselves as
missionaries off to save the world.  Miss Canada, 22 year
old Lynsey Bennett, went to Nigeria to lecture the Islamic
world about the death sentence handed out to a Nigerian
woman damned by Islamic law to death for adultery.

And on the same side, there is the "Playboy philosophy"
which favours beauty pageants because they display women
according to the philosophy - - as sex objects.  The way of
the Playboy is strewn with luscious babes, expensive toys
and 24/7 hedonism.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for sex.  Men and women are
sexual creatures.  But that's different from the view of
women as sexual objects; decorations on the cake of a
paternalistic society.  

In a ironic twist, the Muslim and Playboy worlds coincide in
Islamic heaven.  According to Muslim legend, when martyrs
die in the defense of Islam they are immediately transported
to heaven where 72 virgins await their pleasure.

"As for the righteous, they shall surely triumph. Theirs
shall be gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed virgins for
companions: a truly overflowing cup," Koran 78:31

Women have apparently not yet become persons in the Islamic
world.  But we need not be smug in the as long as the
Neanderthal spectacle of beauty pageants is around.  Like
the appendix, civilization has evolved to the point that
beauty pageants serve no function.  They only fester when
infected.

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