Women should be free to enjoy stupid fun too
- Source: Global Times
- [22:16 March 16 2010]
- Comments
Illustration: Liu Rui
By Robert Foyle Hunwick
Miss Laowai China is the kind of event that, had it been planned to be held in Boston, Cambridge or Paris, would probably have been drowned at birth by a stalwart alliance of feminists, church groups and student activists.
But this is Beijing and "liberal" opponents of such innately puerile concepts don't really have much traction here. Whether that's a good thing or not probably depends on how seriously you take such matters as a beauty contest for foreigners in China.
Fortunately, it seems, not that many people do. There has, as yet, been no apoplexy from the kind of women's organizations who raised Cain in 2008 over "Miss University London" or the Islamists who completely ruined an attempt to stage Miss World in Nigeria in 2002 by rampaging through Abuja, killing 100 civilians.
Of course, China is a "developing country," which means it often cribs ideas and concepts it perceives as fashionable in the West to boost its own perception of modernity, in this case a swimsuit contest that fell out of favor well over a decade ago.
But intriguingly, the cycle of popularity has come round again on the side of beauty competitions, helped by judicious publicity from the likes of Donald Trump, who owns the Miss Universe franchise. Miss Laowai China couldn't, in a way, be better timed.
Whether the foreign population living over here agrees might be seen when the contest rolls ahead in August.
Meanwhile, last week's Women's Day saw a focus on serious matters of employment law, maternity care and domestic abuse.
Back home, where most of these battles have already been decided in the statute books, feminist thinkers still need to make a living. Miss Laowai would provide them with a major payday.
Women's rights pioneers who fought for greater female freedom can have a hard time facing up to the fact that their daughters' generation often demonstrate those hard-won rights by making choices that horrify traditional feminist thought: "Raunch culture" and the resurgence of housewifery as a career choice are two surefire touch points of the current gender war.
The beauty contest revival is another. You're allowed to make any choice you want is the old feminist rhetoric, just so long as it's the right one. It turns out some women are just as prescriptive about what girls should do as their patriarchal forebears.
Today's young women aren't so doctrinaire; they mostly just do what they want. Being radically minded is, like, a total bore. William Garst paints a touchingly politic illusion that the majority of foreign women here in China are "very smart, highly educated, professional," (and presumably holding a gun to his head as he wrote).
A lot of the younger ones, however, may be so and yet still perceive a competition like this as an amusing adventure. If they didn't, after all, there wouldn't be a competition.
