When beauties meet the beasts of war

The Miss Universe pageant has come a long way since the days when contestants were asked questions to test their morals, wit or social conscience and, almost as a prerequisite, had to respond by expressing a yearning for “world peace”. Those were perhaps less complicated times. 

News coverage of the most recent edition of the competition, which ended with a gala telecast last month, was dominated by an embarrassing gaffe in which the names of the winner and runner-up got mixed up. The silver lining for the organisers was that the blunder diverted attention from the potentially harmful question posed to eventual winner Miss Philippines during the interview round. Standing on an American stage, with millions of Americans watching, she was asked about the uproar in her homeland over the United States reopening one of its military bases there.

To her credit, Pia Wurzbach fielded the politically charged query with studied coolness – and in the process might even have earned herself the crown. “I think that the US and the Philippines have always had a good relationship,” she said. “We’ve been colonised by the Americans and we have their culture in our traditions, even up to this day. The Philippines is very welcoming to the Americans, and I don’t see any problem with that at all.”

Even with its seeming backhanded compliment regarding colonial days, Wurzbach’s thumbs-up for Yankee expansionism surely pleased the host nation, but, when she returned home, not even the Miss Universe sash and tiara were adequate shields for the inevitable backlash. She was pilloried by countrymen who’d spent decades getting the US to close the bases it established in the Philippines more than a century ago and fully armoured towards the end of World War II.

The German-Filipino Wurzbach, 26, is a fashion model and TV personality who’s acted in movies, but nothing could have prepared her for the question thrust upon her on the pageant stage. The fault for putting her in such a precarious position lies with the organisers and whoever came up with the question. Presumably they were attempting to see if she could shed some light on the contentious issue for the intellectuals in the audience. Instead, her response – like any individual reply in a man-on-the-street survey – proved nothing, and it certainly won’t change any minds about the US military base. Nor would it have made a difference if she’d opposed the base’s reopening.

The US and its coalition partners invaded Iraq against the will of the world as represented by the United Nations, so how could the opinion of Miss Universe alter Washington’s designs? The issue then becomes the fairness of posing such a hand grenade of a question in a glorified beauty contest. 

To the argument that Wurzback was merely given a chance to voice her opinion about a news story, we point out that she was aiming to become Miss Universe, not win the Nobel Prize or a columnist’s job at the New York Times. (She would have needed more than three seconds to mull the answer if either were the case.) 

Controversial discourse has no place in popular entertainment of this kind. Beauty pageants in particular, though they’re no longer called that in these politically correct times, are still about glamour and glitz and dreams dashed or fulfilled. It’s nice that mere prettiness combined with middling stage talent is no longer enough to win the title, but suddenly we do find ourselves longing for the days when the most “political” comment a contestant would ever make was that dreary recitation of hopes for world peace. 

If getting the young ladies to pontificate on the pressing issues of our decidedly non-peaceful world is intended to curtail criticism about shallowness and sexism, it strikes us as just another application of cosmetics.