What do the women here think about Beauty Pageants?  I attended one at a local night club in Barbados.  (My girlfriend at the time and I were on a cruise.)  Do beauty contests exploit women? Or do they promote self-esteem?  Do they focus too much on physical beauty of the contestants?  Are the incentives and rewards of winning worth it?   What about fraud or chicanery?  Anyone here ever been in one?  Thanks.
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Only very very sad people partake in beauty paegants ... even sadder people put their children in them ... and even even sadder people go to watch them (on a regular basis.) That is my veiw x

My standard for whether or not I think something is exploitative is this; if I had a daughter, how would I feel about her viewing it. While beauty paegents personally don't upset me, I probably wouldn't want any impressionable person watching women parade themselves around like that. It encourages a culture that evaluates women based on how fake they can be, how spray-painted, stoic, rehearsed they can be. Being a woman is awesome, beautiful and powerful, but women need to learn to be these things on their own terms. Being evaluated and ranked by how good you can perform and how good you look certainly is not a step FORWARD for womankind...