New beauty queen crowned |and this means war!

These so-called “newspapers” had writers who would rave about the young lady’s pulchritude and then stab her in the back with a nasty putdown or hearsay gossip.

Now, of course, we have the social media, whose users shot straight past all that stuff about glowing praise when Weluree “Fai” Disayabut won the Miss Universe Thailand title on Saturday night – and got straight to stabbing her in the back. (Well, at least some things stay the same.)

Those Twitter people proved nastiest of all. “Her figure isn’t even fit for the title” was the gist of many tweets. Obviously the judges disagreed, but the audience at Royal Paragon Hall did. The cheers during the live Channel 3 broadcast were loudest for Pimbongkod “Elle” Chankaew, who nevertheless had to settle for runner-up. 

The online audience went as far as posting a slew of observations unfavourably comparing Fai to Elle, and then they dug further, in the fine but utterly modern tradition of e-journalism. They scanned Fai’s Twitter account (@fyiee) and found her occasionally tweeting “impolitely”. “Actually I’m fat, you animal!” she once remarked to someone, using an apparently favourite epithet. “Animal! Women with big breasts are f***ing halfway to victory,” another tweet exploded. 

Can the purveyor of such language truly represent the country overseas and be a role model for little girls who dream about being Miss Universe Thailand? Fai was called upon to reply in a Channel 3 interview the next day. “Those inappropriate words were used between me and my friends,” she said. “I’m still a teenager – I didn’t think about it!” 

Khao Sod, one of the surviving newspapers, joined the tweeters in lambasting the “big-mouth beauty queen”, reporting that Fai once condemned the red shirts as “anti-monarchy” dissidents, saying on Facebook that Thailand would be cleaner if the “dirty” red shirts emigrated. “I am not neutral,” she railed. “I am so angry with these evil activists. They should all be executed!”

So now the red shirts are in a fury and challenging her right to represent Thailand in foreign beauty contests. She’s nang ngarm salim, they say – the anti-red beauty queen. No, I’m not, Fai responded, incredibly, I’m neutral. Her parents taught her to love His Majesty the King and what she wrote on Facebook was a long time back when she was just being an over-emotional teenager. (There’s that excuse again.) She apologised to her fans and pageant organisers for landing them in hot water (though they ought to be used to that by now). “I will use your criticism to improve myself and do my best to perform my duties,” she promised. 

Not a bad first couple of days as Miss Universe Thailand, really – criticism, controversy, coarse language, apologies, even a political angle. Many Thais are admitting that Thais do tend to take these matters far more seriously than foreigners. “In the United States people take no notice of even the biggest beauty pageants,” observes New York-based media personality Chalermphol “Oate” Ritthichai. Maybe we ought to be screening our politicians this seriously.