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.
Read more after the cut
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. Continue...
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.
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