The Beauty Essay

Whether beauty pageants had indeed bred superficiality, or, whether it had objectified women like commodities up for display, the years following the declaration of martial law only intensified the public fascination for beauty pageants, entrenching the annual selection as a much-awaited national event, a national pastime[iii], by all indications, here to stay. Broadsheets of the time, perhaps to stir constructive self-worth and patriotic pride, ran celebratory full-page ads that featured the likes of Carlos P. Romulo, a Pulitzer Prize winner, happily pointed out as "the first Asian President of the UN General Assembly' and somewhere at the center of the copy, the word, "Filipino"; Eugene Torre, "the first Asian Chess Grand Master", "Filipino"; and Gemma Cruz (yes, the same one), the "first Asian to win the Miss International crown", "Filipino",  paid for by a government agency supervised directly by Malacañang. Classrooms- an academic space where opinions and sentiments are initially formed- were not spared from the brouhaha either. A year-end issue of Junior Citizen, a weekly supplementary material for my sister's social studies class, I remember, had a picture of a resplendent Margie Moran wearing her Miss Universe crown and the banner, Philippines Home of Beautiful Women.

The overenthusiastic tone of the copy was justifiable, of course, considering Gloria Diaz won her Miss U only a short five years ago, and in between, many of the local girls sent out to compete abroad were either cited or crowned[iv],  notably, Aurora Pijuan who was crowned Miss International in Tokyo; Baby Santiago and Nelia Sancho who were both crowned in Australia, with only a two-year interval, as Queen of the Pacific; Evangeline Pascual and Pinky Amabuyok, first and fourth princess respectively, in the Miss World pageant in London; and a host of others, some in smaller pageants that has since been discontinued.

It was a weird and wonderful time and place, my childhood[v], a milieu where the perky Imelda Marcos, made more unstoppable by the authoritarian rule put to effect by her husband, launched one prestige project after another, all financed by foreign loans, and was raring to go farther. It was a time when beauty and beautification was a fixation, a new acquired taste: parks were being spruced, government buildings were being refurbished, grand new structures were being erected, shanties were being hidden from view, and every town and city, amidst the continuing social and political gloominess, were abuzz, in a flurry to beautify, to beautify[vi].

(To be continued)

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[i] We Filipinos don't like ourselves so much as a people." says psychiatrist Dr. Cynthia Leynes, chair of the Psychiatry Department of the UP Manila in a magazine article, "Are You Bi-polar?", Style Weekend, 2008, "Very early in our kids' education, we need to introduce things that will make them look at themselves in a better light. They need that."

[ii] "A beauty queen who denounces beauty contests was unheard of anywhere in the world until Gemma Cruz-Araneta, the Miss International for 1965 and the first Filipina ever to win an international beauty tilt, stood tall and proud in the picket line of this year's Miss Philippines contest." wrote Letty Jimenez- Magsanoc in the feature, "Gemma, Gemma, Quite Contrary" which appeared in the September 17, 1972 issue of the Philippine Panorama - the last issue of the said Sunday magazine before the declaration of martial law which, as we all know, suspended the Philippine constitution, abolished Congress, and ended the long tradition of free press.