Too many times has it been quoted and re-quoted: the Pinoy is obsessed with the three B's --- boxing, basketball and beauty pageants.
Pinoys are such suckers for these forms of entertainment that there was a time when the Pambansang Kamao had a live-via-satellite match, the entire country literally freezes. And perhaps this is the only time that the crime rate drops to zero.
We love seeing Pinoys in all forms of contests just to have the over enthusiastic among us find some reason to rally behind a kababayan. We love the good old salpukan and salpakan whether it is through vicious upper cuts or three point shots or an entire vocabulary of catwalk sashaying (Shamcey's tsunami walk, Catriona's lava walk, etc.) as long as a countryman is there representing the archipelago against the world. We love to find a reason --- any reason to cheer behind a local hero --- because in real life, we badly need them to give us a sense of who we are.
But please take note.
This year the caretakers and brand managers of Miss Universe no longer calls it a beauty pageant.
It has is now called a competition. It can now be placed side by side with online gaming, speed Rubics cube contests or creative party games using ping pong balls.
Soon it may turn out to be an Olympic sport like ballroom dancing or figure skating. Whatever. But it is still --- and basically --- a contest where women from all over the world are gathered, made to wear surreal versions of their national costumes (this year somebody represented her country with a costume complete with a dressing room, another came dressed as a predecessor of Godzilla while another literally had led lights embedded in her gown), vavavoom swimsuits and evening gowns with enough Swarovski crystals to cause epileptic attacks when spotlights are aimed on them.
Hey wait! There is absolutely nothing wrong with beauty contests.
Sabi nga, for Filipinos it is a celebration of our love for beauty --- and our addiction to party at the slightest provocation. Should we still wonder why we Pinoys go gaga over beauty contests whereas every eskinita, baranggay and town plaza w0uld mount a pagandahan showdown at the slightest provocation. Little girls are dressed in frilly outfits in Little Miss Something contests with exaggerated adult walks --- and, uh, sometimes there are not even girls.
We are such fun-loving, party-addicted, gimik-stimulated race that we turn funeral wakes into mahjong and Bingo extravaganza. We sing at the slightest provocation, turning videoke machines into instruments of social destruction as every other Filipino aspires to hit notes higher than Regine Velasquez or Lani Misalucha even if he or she cannot carry a tune to save our lives.
Eh, maski nga at the height of revolutions, we are singing and dancing, di ba? Taka ka pa why we make such a big deal about the Miss Universe Competition at the height of a pandemic surge on the very day that almost six thousand new cases of viral infection have been reported by the DOH. Keri lang.
A friend commented, "Ang taas-taas ng standard sa beauty queens pero pagdating sa pulitiko ... tae!"
Well, yeah.
There is no way you can intersect these two different dimensions of reality because the very fact that there is an obsession for boxing, basketball and beauty contests is because of the ugly reality of politics. Or of real life, in general. Dude, these are placebos. These are anesthesia. These are perhaps coping mechanisms under the pretext that laughter accompanied by excitement and suspense --- are the best medicines to dealing with the drudgery of everyday life.
By hyping up fun and games, frothy as they may seem --- we are able to survive and deal with our personal and national hardships with a new source of resilience,
Yet there is something more to it than meets the eye.
We cheer for our representative in that annual Olympics of all beauty pageants because for the decade or so, we have been scoring terrifically. Starting from Venus Raj, we somehow hit the right notes in selecting the kind of girl to send and who could go head-on and face-to-face with the Latinas and Europeans aligned onstage in a battle of pabonggahan.
Yes, people are still correct in saying that the whole yearly exercise of parading women is overrated, overhyped and most of all, self-indulgent.
The selection of Miss Universe does not and cannot have any major impact in solving the problems of the world not could policies affecting environment or poverty or equal rights be affected by a pageant participated by more than seventy nations. Feminists even considers this entire tradition as backwards, demeaning, diminishing women into flesh fitted into swimsuits and flimsy gowns that emphasize their being sex objects.
Again, the rebuttal to all these allegations is that it is a matter of choice: the woman's choice. Joining a competition as large and popular as Miss Universe requires not months but years of training. The preparation of a noteworthy physique is only the final stage for the prepping --- it makes almost superhuman demands on the ladies who must condition their minds to throw themselves onstage and walk the walk, talk the talk. There is an entire art to the pasarella but there is an even greater challenge in learning how to focus, keep that smile on your face and strike a pose like you were born with your arms akimbo.
And, worse yet, these girls are standing onstage with God knows how many millions of people watching worldwide, exhausted from rehearsals and yet perfectly conditioned to look poised, comfortable and glamorous made to answer mind-boggling questions to add gravitas to the proceedings.
Imagine standjing in that glittery gown with a slit cut up to way up there answering questions meant for Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand:" If you were the leader of your country, how would you have handled the COVID19 pandemic?"
Talaga lang, ha? In thirty seconds, you are expected to smile, look sparkly and answer a question about geopolitics, health and a crisis situation?
Or what about, "Given a choice ... would you choose to lock down your country or open its borders for ecenomic recovery during the pandemic?"
Uh, you need to be Angela Merkel to come up with a convincing answer ... and not one coated with generalizations and a word or two about the will of God. But still, you have to give it to the ladies who find the most credible answer conceivable in a high pressure situation.
This all leads to the point of just how much pressure these ladies are subjected in a week ... just one week ... stuffed with rehearsals, pictorials, video shoots, promotional interviews. It must take Olympic level training for the Queen Wannabes to endure both physical, mental and, yes, psychological stress to comply with a super tight and almost Spartan training schedule of rehearsals.
Added to all this is how Filipinos tend to not only support but demand superpowers from the lady fielded to the contest to represent the archipelago. But then let us face it: we can never produce a Pia or a Catriona every effing year as it takes some genetic miracle to concoct a winning combination of beauty, brains, stamina and the killer charms of a cobra. It is best to remember that it took forty or so more years before the crown landed on a Filipina's head after Margie Moran's triumph in Greece. But for ten --- now eleven straight years --- the Pinay representatives always made it to the top 20 or 21, some landing on the top five with a share of runners-up.
But despite all that, fueled by the fire and brimstone of the internet, the pressure on the Philippine candidate can be ... uh, traumatizing,
Yes, it must be all that hype that created near-impossible expectations added to the usual share of inevitable bashers. There is no denying that Rabiya Mateo tried her best as attested by months of practice enhanced by almost military discipline. Yet even at the very start, her selection has already been discolored by so many controversies and questions that added pressure to her to prove that she is worth her mettle.
And she did. If the hype built her to what the public perceived --- then it is all that hoopla, the somewhat miscalculated amount of rah-rah-rahs that made it a damn-if-you-do/damn-if-you don't battle for her. Yet what is important is that until the end, she tried and never gave a reason for anybody to criticize her for her performance.
In a pageant that shall now be known as the Latina Edition where all the finalists were from the same region except for a token representative from India, it was more than good enough to hit the top twenty-one together with Indonesia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand. And in this pageant where other outstanding ladies from South Africa, Iceland, Canada and Nepal did not even enter the semi-finals, we should applaud Rabiya for slugging it out there to the very end.
And as for this year's winner? Te veo el proximo ano.
Now back to reality. And the pandemic.
No comments:
Post a Comment