Trapper's Swamp

I don't think beauty queens are critical to our survival or growth as a society or country, but some people think it is a big enough imperative to import them.

No Singapore lady has ever won an international beauty pageant which prompted some to suggest importing foreigners to represent Singapore for us to stand a good chance of winning!

A former judge of beauty pageants Professor Wang Jinfa said Singapore should emulate the example of the Singapore Sports Association Foreign Talent Scheme to recruit potential candidates from overseas and groom them well before sending them for international competitions.

[Adonis CEO] Li Jinmei also supported recruiting foreign beauties to Singapore to make up for the “shortfall” here.

Are beauty pageants that important? More to the point, why do we want to win every award under the sun, and win badly enough to import them for this very purpose? And in winning, how does it ever justify our existence, or this country's relevance to the world? We have not produced beauty queens who can win international competitions, so we should import them?

The stupidity is astounding. And I have yet to mention the implications of this statement:

Adonis CEO Li Jinmei thought that the chief reason for this is that women with both looks and brains are unwilling to participate in beauty pageants as they are not keen to “expose” themselves in bikinis to the public.

No, Miss Li. It is likelier that women with both looks and brains don't think of beauty pageants as something worth their time in, because they don't need the crown to tell them they have both looks and brains.They don't need to parade themselves in bikinis to feel good about themselves, not that they fear the bikini. This statement insults the intelligence of all Singaporean women, including beauty queens. It castigates beauty queens by saying all they good for is the bravery of exposing themselves in bikinis to the public, and denigrates Singaporean women as lacking the courage to show up in bathing suits.

If winning beauty pageants mean the world to you, go right ahead and participate. Just don't make it sound like an issue of such national importance that policy should be crafted for it. That just shows how shallow we really are, as a people.

Enough with beauty pageant talk already. All of us have bigger fish to fry.

Update on Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 9:34AM by Callan Tham

I was told the Temasek Review link I referenced was dead; I checked it and it is astill there, but takes ages to load. Here's a link to the Google cache of that article for those of you who can't wait.