The news is in this morning. Miss Angola Leila Lopes is now Miss Universe. For those of you from the United States, which means we have trouble finding the United States on a map of the United States, Angola is located in Africa. That’s right underneath Europe, which is right next to a large body of ocean called the Atlantic, which is named after the record company of the same name.
I’m sure a lot of you are wondering how someone from Angola won the Miss Universe pageant, while a lot more of you are wondering who the hell even cares about the Miss Universe pageant any more. You see, for most liberal women, the idea of a pageant is horrific, a place where Neanderthal men point at women with boob jobs and measure their respect by how well they fill a swimsuit, pretending to care about their answers to important philosophical questions like, “And how would you make world peace happen in our life time?” Most people have stopped finding the Miss Universe pageant to be socially and intellectually relevant, even as the pageant swears the whole institution is a scholarship competition designed to “enrich” women.
Now, I don’t really care about the argument any more than I care whether or not Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine is a good or a bad thing, mainly because the magazine, and its dinosaur of an owner, stopped being relevant sometime back in the 1960s, when other thinkers came along and proved that you could make the same point without requiring a girl to take off her clothes so guys would pay attention to what someone might have to say.
Beauty pageants have stopped being relevant a very long time ago, yet they still maintain a presence in our society because people are still Neanderthal enough to think they’re important. And unfortunately, you can’t just blame horny guys for keeping them active. Whenever some woman thinks to herself that “I’m pretty enough” to be in that magazine, or on that stage, then you automatically set up a paradigm where other women will find themselves having to compete with them, even if they swear they’re not interested. You see, the whole human race is built on the concept of competition, and as the players in this race, or game, we all are active in deciding what contest is the one that maintains relevance. I’d like to think that we’ve evolved far enough that the Miss Universe competition is outdated, but we still maintain an importance on this event so that the woman who wins will still manage to maintain a career of successes based on her placement in this contest. Forever, she will be linked by how she sashayed down the runway in her swimsuit, and the rest of us our responsible for how that continues to play out.
What we really need to decide as a society is what do we consider to be relevant enough to put one person above another when it comes to our social Darwinist ideals. If we consider intelligence the most important, than our supermodels should be the smartest men and women available. But let’s be honest with ourselves. We don’t put smart people higher than anyone else. We put rich people (usually men) on a high pedestal, and even if their ideas are idiotic, like those spewed out there by Donald Trump every time he tries to pretend to be significant, and we put at the top of the spectrum attractive women who throw their sexuality at us on a constant basis. And it’s not just at the top of the pecking order we do this because think of every time you’ve gone to a bar, social club or any place where mating rituals occur. Those were the dynamics that fed the engine that caused most of the hooking up to happen. I see it on social sites all of the time, and so do you.
Which means that when it comes down to it, no matter how smart I might be, no matter how many great ideas I might have to make the world a better place, or even how many great novels I might churn out for the masses. In the end, because I’m not filthy rich or insanely attractive, my place on the pecking order is pretty damn low. Yet, because I am part of this human race, I am required to try to fit into the competition as well, even though I recognize that for the most part the dynamic offers me table scraps and a continuous series of disappointments, as not everyone is born with the attributes that gives them immediate success and gratification.
So, having said that, let’s give our congratulations to Leila Lopes, whose name we will not remember in a few days from now (or a few minutes after I press SEND). With that said, she’s still miles ahead of the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.