The oft-borrowed phrase “celebrating the worthless”, from an essay read long ago, continues to impose itself, and too often for comfort, in the contemplation of the local scene.
While the entire country seems enthralled by a third runner-up of a beauty contest, what exactly is being celebrated? The fact that there are pretty women in the country? That surely holds true for every place on the globe.
But the scores of apparently hugely- profitable beauty contest businesses have latched on to an insatiable global appetite to publicly ogle girls (porn is for more private moments…)
In fact, all of these contests require the same standards of female beauty with little variation except perhaps for skin tone — the same body shapes (maybe more breast or buttock here or there as the near-nudity revealed), pleasing made-up faces, lush hairstyles.
The world glued to the display female bodies — how intelligent an activity is that, even for Fr. Jerry Orbos (did he shut his eyes during the bikini segment?) who said in print that he was very proud of her (innocuous and predictable) statement of love for God.
In an interview, she went one further and said it was God speaking through her mouth — wow! God on a beauty pageant stage in Sao Paolo!
The media coverage of this great achievement is relentless, and a TV commentator congratulated her for her “contribution to the country”.
What contribution was that, exactly? Never mind that our maternal mortality rate is the worst in the region, that not one of our universities make it to an international list of good universities, that we do make it to the list of most corrupt countries, that we are the greatest importer of rice because we can’t grow enough even as vast tracks of land lie uncultivated, that we export our women to be the servants of the world, that our natural environment is among the most endangered, that every single day on local radio streams of people beg for the help of strangers for their kin in hospital because public health care is a shambles.
Forget all that — our girl really strut her stuff! She’s a nice girl at that, and will surely build great houses some day, just sucked in like more and more people today by an inexorable tide of cultural hollowness.
We have sunk to such depths that a PhD holder of a prime university finds it sensible to judge contests of mostly children dancing or singing popular American songs with lyrics they can’t possibly understand (including about having sex) with the aim of declaring the winner a “star.”
The message is out loud and clear that to be on display as one sort of “star” or another is a legitimate ambition for children and young people.
That is television’s message, and the call of every fiesta, every beauty pageant, every DSWD day-care “Prince and Princess” contest, not to mention “Sexy Lola” contests.
Sorry, folks, about the recurring rant in this space. How women are regarded just hasn’t progressed a whit.
And isn’t it a continuing cause for dismay that the notion of achievement itself is so degraded? How are a sense of what is worthwhile, worthy of respect, of what may be meaningful goals to be restored?
The Tagalog expression mababaw na kaligayahan gets it about right in describing what’s happening to this society.
