For decades,
feminists have tried to bring down the beauty contest. But now it is breaking up under the weight of its own scandals.
Even before Danielle Lloyd's disastrous turn on Celebrity Big Brother  there were glaring signs that the former beauty queen is, at the very least, foolish. Take the loss of her Miss Great Britain title late last year. After triumphing in the competition in February it emerged that Lloyd was involved with one of the judges, the footballer Teddy Sheringham. She was immediately stripped of her title. Lloyd isn't the only beauty queen whose crown has slipped. Over the past few years, the pageant world has been hit by ever more scandals, rising to a particular frenzy in the US recently, where women from New Jersey to Nevada have been forced to hand in their titles. So, for instance, in December, Katie Rees, Miss Nevada USA, was "relieved of her duties" when a series of old pictures emerged, showing her and some friends flashing in a bar. Ashley Harder, Miss New Jersey USA, handed in her tiara last month when it turned out she was pregnant. The biggest scandal has concerned the reigning Miss USA, Tara Conner. This blew up in December, when it emerged that Conner - who, at 20, is below the legal drinking age - had been visiting New York clubs, was rumoured to have taken drugs, and was thought to have indulged in the odd bit of sexual behaviour.
After years of waning popularity, the recent glut of scandals suggests that beauty pageants might finally be gasping their last, and there's something oddly brilliant that it might be the beauty queens themselves who bring the whole thing tumbling down.
There have always been beauty-queen scandals, of course - back in 1957, for instance, Miss USA, Leona Gage, was dethroned after it turned out that she was on her second marriage and had two children.
But there have never been so many furores in such a short space of time and what they seem to prove is that beauty pageants - an anachronism for many decades now - are being crushed by their own internal contradiction, that the women involved should look sexually available at all times, but never actually be sexually active.
There was a time, of course, when beauty contests were a huge cultural phenomenon. Back in the 1960s and 70s, contests such as Miss World and Miss America were guaranteed massive TV audiences.
Feminist ire was piqued, of course, by the fact that contestants had to parade about in their swimwear being graded out of 10 by B-list celebrity judges.   Prominent young US feminist Jessica Valenti believes that the recent wave of scandal has reminded people of the nasty vein of misogyny that has always run through pageant culture. There seems something very appealing about the fact that these contests might implode because of contestants' own small rebellions.
After all, the women's liberation movement could never have predicted that the women who competed in such contests would ever help bring them down - inadvertently or not.
The Guardian