Belittling Bimbos

 

Portrait of Jeanne Samary (also known as Reverie)

by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1878

 

 

During the 1960s and 1970s, one of my much-looked-forward-to-pleasures as a child was watching the plethora of  televised beauty pageants : Miss Australia, Miss America, Miss World, Miss Universe and all the other Mademoiselles.  It was a curious way in which my father and I bonded and as a 52-year-old female, that insight has received a great deal of pondering over.  As I grew up on a steady diet of meat, three veg & spuds, so consider myself fortunate - or too dense - to have developed serious eating disorders from my exposure to years of ritual beauty pageantry watching at an impressionable age.  The 8-day Israeli Army Diet was as disordered as my eating got. 

 

 

For me, the pageants were all about the frocks!!  Oodles and oodles of beautiful frocks, national costumes and evening gowns.  The glamour!  The colours! The sparkle!  I was glamoured.  Enthralled.  Hypnotized. Awestruck and Bedazzled.  I am a material girl; a sometime textile artist, hoarder of brocades, fondler of velvets and secret keeper of vintage fur collars. [How I never took a U-turn into fashion design I just do not know.  Well, I did with designing slut fashions for my Barbies.  Hmm.....]

 

 

A recent buzz-past of Bad Astronomy at Slate.com surprised me with unveiling another aspect of those late 20th century pageants : the ritualized rooting out of the biggest bimbo at the beauty pageant.

 

 

I never knew that.  I feel like I have been living under a rock my whole life.  Maybe growing up in Australia is like living under a rock when it comes to American culture.  I do not know.  You can bet I will be pondering over this now.

 

 

Mostly, I am somewhat glad to have been too lamb-like and dense in the 1960s and 70s to have picked up on how Ugly Men belittle Beautiful Women in the collective.  It seems like a  fractured cultural acting-out of the fairy-tale of Beauty & the Beast.   Naturally, I thought that the judges sincerely wanted to know Miss Columbia or Miss Japan or Miss Alaska's opinion on these Very Important Questions. Like the rest of the hidden audience, I waited with anticipation to hear a profound answer that would tip the scales between Miss Cosmic Intelligence and Miss First-Loser.

 

 

I sure did not know I was watching dumb animals being teased all those years; a belittling of the Venus-in-Taurus archetype.  I am not sure if the dumb animals were the young women on display or the unseen men of all ages with their eyes glued to the box as their fantasies stiffened into wet dreams.

 

 

Anima.  Animus.

 

 

As I scamper and cartwheel through the goldmine-field of perimenopause, I feel all the false layers of the myriad of ways in which I absorbed my culture's presentation of How to Be Woman and What it Means to be Female being plucked and shed like fluffy penguin chick down.  The recapitulation and dismantling of  pre-puberty and post-puberty perspectives to be replaced by Crone-wisdom is - to be honest - really fucking painful.  I would not have missed this for the world or it's nice shiny satin sash with the gold fringing that annoying never sits right and always slips off the shoulder.

 

You would think they would have sorted that by now with a strategically placed safety-pin, eh?

 

 

A bimbo who does deserve belittling is RFK Jr and his stance on anti-vaccination.  I would wish a pox on this lesser son of a greater father yet going by some of his comments, it does seem he is displaying the general paresis of the insane.