For the last four years of my life, I lived as an expatriate US citizen in the small Arabian Gulf country of Kuwait. In Kuwait, I never wore mini-skirts in public and seldom bared my shoulders outside on the street. My high school prom was cancelled half-way through by the police, because girls in revealing ball gowns were socializing and dancing with boys at a late hour.

 National controversy was ignited when the Kuwait parliament voted to segregate all private schools by gender within the next five years, including the international American school I attended. Then five months ago, I moved to London to study at SOAS. In London, the cold weather is now the only major limitation to my wardrobe. My only contact with policemen currently, is to ask for directions when lost at night in the streets. And the controversy around here isn’t about segregation in education; it’s about a beauty contest.

I took part in the Miss SOAS beauty contest. What an easy target. I’ve been patronized by every paper that’s mentioned my name. How easy it must be to depict all the young women participating in the events as depthless, brainless valley-girls and post-feminist sex symbols; vain and insecure, swapping integrity for fifteen minutes of fame. How easy and how condescending. I know it makes things much simpler when you reduce me to just a silk sash, a saccharine smile, and a silly misquote beneath my picture-but sorry, I am much more than that.

I am not writing to tell you how empowering the competitions are. I am not promoting ‘post-feminism’ or anything else of the sort. I am not writing to condemn the ‘Miss-Ogynyst’ campaign. On the contrary, I think debate and discussion is a marvelously important part of student culture. So I am writing because the event organizers and the sidewalk protestors shouldn’t be the only voices heard, because the girls on the stage also have something to say. The contests have been attacked from every predictable angle. You can label them frivolous, futile, a call for attention, and an excuse for a party, but to identify it as a ‘cattle-market’ is to compare groups of independent-minded young women to herds of livestock, incapable of thinking and deciding for themselves.

I’ve only done a term and a half of my degree so far, but I’ve read just about enough political philosophy to infer that the subject of individual choice and liberty is on the treacherous side. “Wear this, don’t wear that. Marry young and take care of a family. No, study at a good university and have a career. Legalize birth control pills. Or go get knocked up and work minimum wage in a nail salon.” 60s and 70s Women’s Liberationists were all about allowing women to make choices-but only if they were the right ones.

 The liberated woman of today, however, is able to choose both.  She is not the so-called ‘female chauvinist pig’ of post-feminist theory. She is my single working mother who cooks, keeps house, and presides over a university faculty; at once both a respected academic with a PhD and the most beautiful woman I know, part dedicated professor and part devoted mum. True freedom is multiplicity of identity: the intellectual University of London student is also the charismatic University of London beauty queen. Are we so socially confined and constricted that one has to negate the other? The controversy over Miss University serves to prove that perhaps the student unions and the newspapers unwittingly perpetuate these singular societal roles that women have long been limited within.

After all, I can tell you with complete conviction that every one of the contestants in Miss SOAS was smart and capable, in addition to being beautiful and completely unique. What made the experience worthwhile for me was not receiving the little tiara at the end of the night, but getting to meet and befriend these amazing girls of diversely different backgrounds, interests, talents, opinions, appearances and personalities. Yet at the portrayal of London’s editorialists and women’s officers, the participants of Miss University are all just brainwashed bimbos, mindless Stepford-style dolls caught in an evil, misogynistic, money-making machine. The fact that we are students at some of the best academic institutions in the city is irrelevant, for surely we are nothing more than vapid smiles and vacuous heads.

Lilian He is Miss SOAS 2008 and a candidate for Miss University London 2009.

Tags: Comment, Miss SOAS, Miss University London

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 14:08 and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.