As Miss World Turns: Swimsuits, ball gowns, and riots

National Review, Dec 23, 2002 by John O'Sullivan

The Miss World competition is much closer to a fashion show than to a strip show. Contrary to the morbid fantasies of the sterner feminists, men do not much enjoy watching pretty girls prance up and down in bathing suits as a preliminary to prancing up and down in ball gowns. It is just about possible that in the dim and distant 1950s a sexist male audience could be assembled to gloat over such a spectacle, because that was about as daring as life got back then. But the sexual revolution ensured that by the 1960s there was a whole series of venues where girls simply got out of their bathing costumes -- and didn't bother getting into anything else. For those who liked that sort of thing, it was no longer necessary either to sit through French philosophizing in the cinema or to listen to the idealistic life program of some coed in order to glimpse a bosom. They could get the icing without having to take the cake -- and, as various gloomy social statistics on illegitimacy confirm, they did so.

Besides, as best my memory tells me, the British Miss World competition was then a program aimed primarily at women. It was a distinctly polite occasion in which any hint of sex was ruthlessly ironed out; the pretense was firmly upheld that this was a competition in niceness and (modest, female) achievement as much as in good looks; and the respectability ethic of that time permeated everything.

Times have changed, of course. Today's respectability ethic means that the current Miss America had to fight strongly for her right to advocate premarital sexual abstinence -- against both the competition organizers and external feminist critics who plainly feared it might be a weird symptom of religious lunacy and, just possibly, a violation of the U.S. Constitution. But respectability still rules: Winners can lose their titles for any hint of impropriety, however defined.

This hygienic and manicured image of the beauty contest ensured that there was very little interest in Miss World from my male companions in adolescence and early manhood: We recognized this event as meant for others. Our female relatives would sit around the television, oohing and aahing at the ball gowns, the swimsuits, the general atmosphere of modest Home Counties glamour. They would debate the claims of the different national contestants. And they would take real pleasure in the happiness of the winner as she walked around the stage wearing a parody of royal attire and waving regally to her subjects. If you think of it as a lower-middle-class version of a fashion show, you will not have it far wrong.

It was -- and remains -- not so much in bad taste as in the worst of good taste: excruciatingly genteel and always in danger of tipping over into satire. One would not be wholly surprised if Dame Edna Everage turned up to host the evening; in a lean year she might even win.

How could such a tame and timid event possibly lead to riots in which perhaps 500 people have died? The short answer, of course, is that it has done no such thing. Muslims in Nigeria rioted not against the Miss World competition itself but against a local newspaper column in which Isioma Daniel, a Nigerian woman journalist (but one trained in the tabloid excesses of Fleet Street), suggested that if the prophet Mohammed were alive today, he might have picked a bride or two from among the nubile contestants. This lighthearted comment promptly provoked Muslim mass murders of local Christians, a fatwa sentencing Ms. Daniel to death (since revoked under government pressure), and the denunciation of the Miss World competition by various concerned feminist and other liberal thinkers throughout the West.

What's going on? If there is a serious long-term problem revealed by this episode, it is that Nigeria and other African countries in which Muslims and Christians live side by side will need energetically to enforce nonsectarian laws and public order on both sets of believers -- but principally on Muslims, since it is they who openly justify imposing their religious rules on others and who are overwhelmingly responsible for sectarian violence. Not surprisingly, very few people made this point. Since September 11, a new and nervous kind of political etiquette has been adopted by progressive circles in the West under which criticism of Islam is to be avoided if at all possible -- and, if it cannot be avoided, then some non-Muslims must be included in the indictment.

The realpolitik reason for this anti-anti-Islamism is that we must do all we can to avoid a clash of civilizations. That is not unreasonable. But since liberals, let alone radicals, do not usually attach such importance to the virtue of prudence in foreign policy, it is probably not the true motivation here. It is more likely that such critics shrink from being found in the same camp as ordinary Americans, whom they have been accusing of "Islamophobia" ever since 9/11. A snobbish sense of superiority to the allegedly bigoted American majority is a powerful motive driving the intelligentsia. Crimes against Muslims must therefore be exaggerated and deplored, while crimes by Muslims must be understood. The Left long ago embraced the inventive doctrine that "oppressed" people cannot offend against free speech since, by definition, they lack the power to do so; yet they are also the only people morally entitled to decide whether political speech is "offensive." Now that Nigerian Muslims have demonstrated exactly what these doctrines mean for freedom of expression in practice, liberals would prefer to direct attention elsewhere.