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No kudos for-b

In case there’s anyone out there who
hasn’t heard yet, the unthinkable happened
in June: a beauty contest was held in Mos-
cow,

Organized by, among others, the Mos-
COW committee of the Young Communist
League, and sponsored by one of the new
Joint enterprises, Burda Moden, the event

aS pleased almost no one and left sharp,
choppy waves in its wake. (For the record, it
Was the second such pageant in the USSR,

the first having passed almost unnoticed in
Lithuania

From the beginning, the Moscow beauty
Contest was attended by controversy. There
Was a considerable row over whether the
Contestants should parade in swim-suits.

On’t that be somewhat “animal-like?”
asked one representative letter to a Moscow
‘ewspaper. The contest organizers, claim-
Ing it Was a matter of perestroika and open-
Ness, Insisted that bathing suits were an
“ssential part of the ambience, as, it seems,
Were also a good many of the other sleazy
trappings of Western beauty contests.

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FROM
MOSCOW

The result, amid a general comedy of
blunders and foolishness, was one se-
quence — described as “fantasia” — that
stood out in bad taste: the girls hobbled, one
at a time, in heels and bikinis down the
runway, bumping and grinding to rock
music, tugging suggestively at their straps
while the (largely male) crowd egged them
on.
In the end, 17-year old Masha Kalinina
was chosen, probably the first Miss Mos-
cow ever. She is obviously a very nice per-
son who likes animals, yachting and taking
candies with her tea. She displayed a certain
amount of wisdom, too, when she recently
turned down a chance to participate in a
lavish Supermodels ‘88 confab in California
because it coincided with her college
entrance exams.

The organizers of the event are jubilant.
They say the contest was “part of peres-
troika, part of becoming more broad-
minded and letting women feel feminine.”

But what does everyone else think?

A group of Canadian communists who
have been visiting the USSR over the past
couple of weeks to study, in fact, women’s
issues, have been asking fairly widely about
this.

Responses from Soviets vary from a
naive — “‘isn’t it great that ‘our’ girls finally
have the opportunity to prove they’re just as
beautiful_as any .others?-’.— to
more studied defences of it on democratic
grounds, to distaste. In general, Soviet
women — who have not been culturally
conditioned to view themselves as horses at
auction — do not seem much impressed
with any aspect of the event.

Many progressive people around the
world have reacted with dismay to news of
the Moscow beauty pageant. Among other
things, a highly critical letter from the Con-
gress of Canadian Women was received and
read very carefully at the headquarters of
the Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC).

According to. Valeria Kalmyk, SWC
deputy chairperson, that letter helped to
focus a tough debate among members of
the committee.

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eauty contest

“One thing we have decided;” Kalmyk
told a round-table discussion with the Can-
adian Communist Party group and several
leading Soviet women academics last week,
“is that we are not going to try to forbid
these things. For too long in this country we
spoke in the language of bans and ordinan-
ces. Now our approach has to be to draw
women into a full debate around questions
like this, to raise consciousness, and we will
provide facilities for this.” (Kalmyk has also
promised to assist the Tribune in following
this discussion.)

Among the Soviet women sitting around
that table, however, there appeared to be
little to debate. Each stated her opinion of
beauty contests, and they were all negative.

“T think the beauty contest was a childish
response to the lifting of bans,” said Ninel
Maslova, deputy editor of a sociological
journal. It was ill-planned, ill-advised, and
badly executed, she said, amounting to little
more than ‘a pale imitation of Western
beauty pageants.”

Philosopher Olga Voronina described
the event as “pornographic” and argued
that it should have been prevented from
taking place. The kind of stereotypes it is
creating for young women are socially dan-
gerous, she said, and she, for one, is prepar-
ing to write an article about this in the press.

Soviet Women’s Committee staff member
Galina Neorustuyeva lambasted the Young
Communist League for organizing the
pageant in the first place. She suggested the
YCL was “playing at perestroika” and
diverting attention from its inability to
mobilize young people around genuine
issues.

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most Soviet women.

- NO praise from

Perhaps the best line belonged to trade
union researcher Elvira Novikova, who
defined a beauty contest simply as “a game
that men organize under conditions of plu-
ralism.”

This debate is not over. Stay tuned to this
channel for much, much more.

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Pacific Tribune, August 17, 1988 7