What the Miss World Pageant taught me about Femininity
They say that you don’t truly find your identity until you come up against its boundaries and these boundaries are often delineated by what we call the comfort zone. Coming of age as young woman raised in a decidedly feminist and anti-feminine world, the question of my identity was always in conflict with my sex. What did it even mean to be a woman? My mother, the natural place for me to find the answer, seemed miles away having been raised in a different country and different culture entirely. Nevertheless, I found the answer in the most unlikely (or perhaps very likely) place: a beauty pageant.
I believe I participated in beauty pageants right before they were completely overtaken by men pretending to be women just because they wear dresses and heels. Was wearing dresses and heels all it took to be a woman? What is the role of this performance of etiquette and decoration that forms so central a part of femininity? These were questions I had often asked myself, and nowhere did I find more clarity than by doing what others call a “superficial endeavour in vanity”. A beauty contest? How trivial. And yet doesn’t each girl in her heart of hearts wish to parade around in a beautiful dress and be called the fairest of them all? If you say no, dear one, you are lying. It wasn’t about winning anyway, what I learned on the path of this endeavour, I will never forget.
There are many “intellectual justifications” I can pretend to make about why I decided one day to sign up for the Miss World Canada Pageant, but the honest answer is a lot simpler and more innocent: I just wanted an excuse to be a girl for once.
When I signed up for the Miss Canada Pageant, I had just started my Master’s program in Neuroscience, after having completed my undergraduate degree in human physiology and anatomy. It was not necessarily a “masculine” world that I came from so much as a dry, practical, de-sexed one. The people around me had no care for aesthetics, beauty or art in general. Modern scientists are a practical race of people, concerned with what can be measured, graphed and calculated. The endeavour seeps into their very ethic about the world. They dress and present themselves in such a way so as to boast to the world, “look how little I care of my appearance, look how little sleep I’ve gotten doing this *important work for humanity*.” This ethic is a function of the pride that drives modern science and its disciples. Living in the comfortable, hospital blue, barren walled, nest of modern science made me a creature just like them––afraid to get a manicure or curl my hair for fear of offending the gods of practicality and scientism.
Amid this cult of pony tails and scrubs, of track suits and coffee breath, a part of me still lived a world apart. I thoroughly enjoyed wearing dresses and skirts, making my hair look nice; a clandestine femininity burgeoned in my chest with no voice to make itself heard.