Meawhile, nine out of 10 don't give a rat's arse

An English woman named Samantha Brick, variously described as an ex-tv presenter, a journo and a columnist, but more probably someone who's famous for being well-known, has caused a storm by, in the first place, publishing an article whose theme was that there are "downsides to looking this pretty", then by appearing on tv to back up her claims that "10 out of 10 men" fancy her, while women hate her because of her beauty.
Thousands registered their outrage by email and text. I can't discover the main thrust of their missives, only that they were, to use Brick's word, "bile"; nor do I know how many were fired by men and how many by women. I'm guessing, though, that a good number of both would have taken issue with her self-assessment, and given her robust feedback of their own on her looks and their appeal to the opposite sex.
While it's tempting to be similarly snarky, I'm reluctant to take any woman to task for believing she's good-looking enough  Most of us are painfully insecure, and that insecurity causes no end of problems - from spending small fortunes on doomed and/or inadvisable ways of becoming more beautiful, to anorexia and bulimia, and clinging like limpets to the wrong man because we think no-one else could possibly love us.
And, since it turns out Brick lives in France, what she says about the way women freeze her out might have some truth to it. My informants - one native-born French woman, plus a New Zealand man and a New Zealand woman who have each lived for a long time in France - tell me that many French women do indeed see themselves in competion for men, and treat attractive women accordingly.
So that said, would I, if given the chance, enjoy having Brick at my dinnertable? Er. no, thanks. Rampant narcisissism makes dull company.            

Isn't she lovely? No, wait, she's a feminist!

Foolish of me to say a few days ago that I'd uttered my last word on the subject of beauty queens. Mrs Lott's remark that "real" feminists don't enter pageants jogged my memory that I once met and interviewed one who did. And if Mrs Lott knows about her, it would explain her heart-felt "ergh".

It's the final of the 1988 Miss California contest, a lead-up to Miss America. As the clip begins, note behind and to the left of that expanse of front-row 80s shoulder pad the young woman in blue. The two finalists are named and step to the left, putting the woman in blue on their right. Don't blink or you'll miss what happens next.



She's Michelle Anderson of Santa Cruz. The silk banner she pulled from her decolletage read "Beauty pageants hurt all women", and her protest earned international coverage.

I was living in Berkley at the time, with a photographer. I tracked Michelle down and a few days later S and I drove down to Santa Cruz to interview her. Her studio apartment was bright and airy and a bit student-messy. The blue dress hung resplendent on a wall. Michelle was cheerful, forthright, unrepentant. The profile I wrote up was published in the Listener in, I think, 1989, but neither its online archives nor my own go back that far so I'll have to rely on other contemporary reports.

Here's the New York Times of June 16, 1988:

Beauty Contestant Denounces the 'Indignities'

SAN DIEGO, June 15— A beauty contestant who pulled a protest banner from her bra in the middle of the Miss California pageant Monday says she plotted the disruption for a year and a half.

The contestant, Michelle Anderson, displayed a white silk banner declaring 'Pageants Hurt All Women' just as the winner, Marlise Ricardos, was about to be announced.

Other participants yanked away the banner, and security guards promptly removed Miss Anderson, who was Miss Santa Cruz, from the San Diego Civic Center's stage.

At a news conference Tuesday, Miss Anderson, who is a college student, said she dieted, took voice lessons and spent $5,000 over a period of 18 months to carry her message against beauty pageants to the contest stage.

'Expose the Lies'

'I wanted to go behind the scenes of pageants and expose the lies they promote, such as women like to be judged by men, or like to duct tape their breasts,'Miss Anderson said.

She said beauty pageants gave women the message that to be beautiful they had to be thin, blonde and young.

'Women suffer severe indignities to try to be beautiful according to these standards,' she said.

The 21-year-old Miss Anderson is a junior at the University of California at Santa Cruz majoring in community studies. She said her protest cost her the Miss Santa Cruz title and a $3,000 scholarship.

Organizers reacted to her move with anger and surprise. ...

Miss Anderson said the idea for the stunt came in a protest planning session with a former model, Ann Simonton [pictured], whose Santa Cruz-based group, MediaWatch, has staged a number of pageant demonstrations.

Largest Possible Audience

The plan was for Miss Anderson to get to the largest possible audience before sharing her message. If she had won the Miss California pageant, she would have kept silent until reaching the Miss America pageant.

The people.com archive backgrounds the story:

The daughter of a now retired Air Force colonel, Anderson discovered her feminist consciousness early.... [T]wo years ago, Anderson met Ann Simonton. Once a top model, Simonton had come to believe that pageants dehumanize women, and for eight years she had picketed the Miss California pageant. Simonton asked Anderson to phone for details of the pageant so she could make plans for a new demonstration. "I pretended I wanted to be a contestant," says Anderson. "Then all of a sudden I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what an idea...' "

Tall (5'11"), somewhat blond and already striking, Anderson set out to make herself over in the image of a perfectly groomed pageant champion. She bleached her hair, dieted, took voice lessons, spent hours in tanning salons. She also embarked on a campaign of deception, claiming, for example, to be a fundamentalist Christian. For all her preparation, Anderson had to settle for third place in the 1987 Santa Cruz pageant.

Relieved, she reverted to being herself. But as the 1988 pageant neared, she decided to try again. "The first time, I didn't know about taping my breasts, didn't know I was supposed to spray my butt to keep my swimsuit from riding up," she says. At the urging of pageant officials, she came on with studied meekness at interviews. Last February she became Miss Santa Cruz. Even runner-up Frey admits, "She deserved to win."

During her three-month reign, Anderson cheerfully attended gas station openings and dance recitals while she plotted her protest. "It was incredibly intense," she says of the moment of unfurling, "but I had no second thoughts." After getting the bum's rush, she changed quickly out of her white [sic] evening gown to join Simonton and 60 other protestors on the sidewalk outside.

And finally, the Orlando Sentinel followed up two years later:

SANTA CRUZ, CALIF. — She has gained 30 pounds, doesn't wear makeup and no longer glues her swimsuit to her body. Now she wears blue jeans and sweat shirts, and she feels most comfortable when she can be 'just plain ugly.'

It has been nearly two years since Michelle Anderson of Santa Cruz infiltrated the Miss California Pageant and during the finale unfurled a banner that read 'pageants hurt all women.'

What followed was a full-scale media blitz - Anderson's story was carried in newspapers around the country and as far away as Germany. She even got a guest spot on the Geraldo show.

'I had no idea that the story would be as big as it was,' Anderson said recently. 'It was just a whirlwind after the protest. People were calling me wanting to buy the rights to my life story, make a movie of the week. One guy called and wanted to make a poster of me.'

Anderson, 23, admits she made some mistakes the first time around. Still, she says, she would do it again - in a heartbeat.

'I have no regrets about what I did. My message is that pageants demean all women in a variety of ways, and my experience on the inside only reaffirmed that it's true,' she said. 'Because real women don't look like that and real women feel terrible that they don't look like that.'

Anderson said women in the pageant put duct tape under their breasts to create cleavage and starved to be thin. She said contestants would spray adhesive all over their bodies to keep their suits in place during the swimsuit competition.

After the Miss California Pageant in June 1988, it took about a year for her life to return to normal. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in May 1989 with honors and an undergraduate degree in community studies (the study of social change). In addition, she has written a book about her experiences inside the Miss California Pageant. It's called Becoming Barbie: Tales of an Undercover Beauty Queen.

Anderson got the idea for the book's title when she thought back to a make-over session between the Miss Santa Cruz and Miss California pageants in the spring of 1988.

'There were these people there and they kept putting more and more makeup on me, and making my hair bigger and bigger,' Anderson recalled. 'When they were done, they stood back and crooned, 'Oh my, who does she look like? She looks just like Barbie.' It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I thought I was going to vomit.'

Michelle Anderson's most telling insight into the pageant game was that she wasn’t beautiful but that she learned to be “good at” beauty.

Be very afraid, Mrs Lott.

Holding open the door

Ria van Dyke, 21, of Auckland, aka Miss Econo Heat, who was crowned Miss Universe New Zealand, and named Miss Charity Queen and Miss Potential Model in Wellington on Saturday night.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Ms van Dyke "wowed the judges through a series of tasks [sic], including an interview on Friday during preliminary judging, strutting in a bikini and evening wear before the audience last night, and dancing on stage to the Copacabana along with her competitors."

We’re not told what intellectual territory she and the judges traversed in her interview, which leaves me wondering if the fact that Ms van Dyke has a BA (Hons) in psychology and sociology – and was going back to Auckland after the show to finish two essays towards her master's degree – counted towards the judges’ final decision.

I suspect not, given the eagerness with which she and her 11 fellow contestants pointed out to another interviewer that they weren’t just pretty faces.

They were also keen to disabuse anyone of the notion that – god forbid – they were feminists. The very term elicited an “ergh, no!” from contest director Val Lott, who said she didn’t think “girls that are real feminists enter pageants.”

Some of us spent a good part of the 70s trying to work out what a “real” feminist was. (Where was Mrs Lott when we needed her?) Early on I rejected the “if you’re with us, you’re against us”/“if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” position. Now, I reject it even more firmly. Ideology is never more important than people, and the result when it becomes so is always hideous. As my New York friend Jim Raymond says, “Certainty kills.”

Yes, it’s dismaying when bright young women can’t bear to be thought feminist – do they know for how many centuries they were denied the vote, access to a university education and a fair share of matrimonial property, and who it was fought to get them these rights? – but my guess is it’s merely the caricature they’re rejecting. You know the one – an ugly combination of man-hater and man-imitator, humourless, rude and aggressive.

I daresay there are feminists like this. I know for sure there are women (not to mention men: see below, for instance) like this who aren’t feminists.

These youngsters, added Mrs Lott helpfully, still liked men to hold the door open. Feminism for her meant “back in the 60s where there was a lot of nastiness and they [feminists] were quite rude about pageants and I thought 'We don't comment on how you want to live and what you do, so why would you comment on us'?"

Except that, given the happy perpetuation of that daft stereotype, they did and still do.

Rudeness seems to be a particular worry for Mrs Lott. "There was a stage when I think women in general got quite rude to men, especially younger girls, and men, young guys, were saying to me 'I'm not holding the door open for them' ... I just don't like that at all. Men and women, no matter what sex you are, you should be respected."

I don’t disrespect the contestants - they’re young and hopeful; they want to get on, whatever that means to them, and believe this is a way of doing so. And they enjoy looking pretty in sparkles and flounces. They remind me of the little girls who go shopping with their mothers dressed as fairies in sparkly crowns and wings. Perhaps if these young women get it out of their systems now, they won't be such suckers for the full white wedding and its ensuing disappointments.

I admit, though, I'm struggling to respect Mrs Lott, who on the whole seems a lot dimmer than someone her age and stage ought to be.

As a last word on the whole surreal business, I’d like to report that last year’s Miss Universe New Zealand apparently told this year’s that the highlight of her reign was meeting Miss Universe co-owner Donald Trump. If you don’t know about Mr Trump – or even if you do – you might enjoy a visit here http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=Donald_Trump

This is what The Trump (and his favourite kind of accessory) looks like.

And in case you think I’m deliberately picking an unattractive picture (which I am), here's one that suggests some kind of gruesome good mood.

Now, if Trump wasn’t absurdly rich and therefore powerful, would a nice young woman still have found it such a pleasure to make his acquaintance? You really can't blame us older feminists for the occasional weary sigh.