We only hate beauty contests because they remind us we are contestants too, and most of us would not make semifinals.
That is the real sting. Not that a few women walk a stage in sequins, but that an entire civilization watches a crude, fluorescent version of its own sorting algorithm and feels seen.
So we do what we always do with uncomfortable mirrors. We call them backward, sexist, trivial. We announce that women must be liberated from them, as if the contestants were hostages rather than adults doing risk-reward math in public.
Notice how selective that concern is. No one writes think pieces asking whether day traders have “really consented” to the psychological damage of staring at candlestick charts and losing their savings. We assume they are adults who decided that the potential upside is worth the cortisol. Suddenly, when the asset is beauty instead of beta, agency becomes suspect and we start speaking very slowly, as if to children.
That double standard is data. It tells you that what offends us is not risk, not competition, not self-exploitation. What offends us is women openly using an asset everyone knows exists, in a system they can name, for prizes they can cash.
Beauty is not a bug in the brain
The polite fiction says: beauty only matters because patriarchy and advertising tricked us. If we were enlightened, we would not care about faces or bodies. We would somehow date and hire through pure vibes and essays.
This is cute, and false.
Humans are aesthetic animals. We respond to patterns in sound, symmetry in faces, balance in movement, light on water. Long before billboards, people gathered to hear better voices, watch more graceful bodies, stand in front of mountains and feel something wordless and precise.
Philosophers noticed this. Plato did not treat beauty as a cheap distraction from truth; he mapped it as one of the routes toward it. Entire traditions have tried to understand why certain forms, colors and proportions feel “right” to us, almost like a sense organ that feeds on order.
So when you build a formal competition around beauty and presence you are not inventing superficiality. You are doing something more dangerous. You are acknowledging that this channel is real and powerful, then installing a scoreboard on it.
That is why pageants are philosophically interesting. They do three forbidden things at once.
They say beauty matters. They measure it. They let people trade it.
In a culture that loves to pretend beauty is either everything or nothing, that middle position is heresy.
The scandal of making it explicit
Most systems keep their aesthetics implicit. Politics officially runs on policy. Corporations officially run on performance. Academia officially runs on ideas. Entertainment officially runs on “talent.”
In practice, across all four, beauty and presentation are running in the background like an operating system.
We just do not admit it.
We say the handsome politician won on “vision.” The photogenic CEO on “strategy.” The charismatic professor on “rigor.” The camera-ready activist on “moral clarity.” We retrofit substance into a body our primate brain was already tracking.
Pageants are cleaner. They say it out loud: we are looking at faces, bodies, movement, voice, and how these interact with intelligence and advocacy and pressure. Yes, we are scoring you on beauty. Yes, that is part of the point.
That transparency is offensive to people who rely on the same dynamics while insisting they are above them.
You could argue that a structure that openly includes beauty as a criterion, alongside other dimensions, is more ethical than one that pretends beauty does not matter while quietly rewarding those who have it. The pageant is at least honest about what is being converted into what.
Everywhere else, aesthetic capital is laundered before it hits the balance sheet.
Embodied excellence that is not allowed to count
We already accept one form of body-based competition as noble: athletics.
Train your body to move faster, jump higher, hit harder. Destroy your joints, restrict your diet, sacrifice social life. We call that striving. Your body is your instrument, your temple, your “vehicle for achievement.”
Now compare that to a pageant contestant who maintains conditioning, learns posture and movement, masters stage presence, trains her voice, drills interviews, calibrates her expressions. Same tools. Different story.
One is “discipline.” The other is “objectification.”
In both cases, a human reshapes biology into a socially rewarded pattern. The gymnast and the pageant contestant are both expressions of bodily optimization under constraint. One explores what a body can do. The other explores what a body can be, and how that being can be rendered legible in a few minutes under hot lights.
If you cheer for the first and sneer at the second, you are not defending human dignity. You are defending a hierarchy of acceptable body uses.
You are saying: the body is allowed to be an instrument for speed, but not for stillness. For impact, but not for presence. For points on a scoreboard, but not for a composite score that includes “you looked like you belonged there.”
That is not ethics. That is aesthetics about aesthetics.
Beauty as capital, and the disgust at seeing the ledger
Whether you like it or not, beauty is capital.
It opens doors, lowers friction, increases attention, changes how people interpret your words. Attractive defendants get lighter sentences. Attractive candidates get more callbacks. Attractive influencers sell more things they never use.
We can argue about how much that should be true. We cannot honestly say it is not true.
Pageants are one of the few institutions that treat this capital as something you can route. They create a pipeline where beauty, presence and communication skills can be converted into scholarships, media platforms, networks, business deals, political on-ramps.
You can say the exchange rate is unfair. You can say the currency is unstable. But it is at least a system.
Outside pageants, beauty capital is often wasted or extracted informally. Individuals pay the costs and others skim the benefits in the form of sales, votes or attention. In the pageant world, contestants at least get a set of explicit, if flawed, mechanisms to parlay those traits into assets that can survive the decay of their jawline.
Call it cynical. Or call it a more rational response to a market everyone else insists on pretending is fake while trading in it daily.
Beauty required, beauty denied
The lazy critique says: pageants tell women that beauty is everything.
Look at the actual structure. You do not win on face alone. You need the right body, but also posture, narrative, articulation, stage composure, an advocacy platform, fluency in a certain moral dialect. You must be photogenic and “relatable,” impressive and non-threatening, polished and “authentic” in exactly the right dose.
The multidimensional scoring is not progressive. It is still drenched in class and culture and colonial baggage. But it does something conceptually sharp: it encodes beauty as necessary but not sufficient.
That is more philosophically nuanced than the two slogans the rest of society offers.
On one side: beauty is everything. On the other: beauty should not matter at all. Both are lies. The pageant, in its clumsy way, lands closer to the uncomfortable middle, where beauty matters a great deal but fails without other forms of excellence riding on top of it.
We dislike pageants in part because they refuse the comfort of simple positions. They do not solve the beauty problem. They operationalize it.
Who we trust with their own tradeoffs
There is another quiet insult hidden in the standard outrage.
We treat pageant contestants as if they cannot possibly have thought through the consequences. As if they have never heard of eating disorders or sexism or unrealistic standards. As if the average twenty-five-year-old who has survived the internet needs a committee of commentators to explain that being judged on your body can be painful.
So we frame them as dupes in need of rescue rather than agents who made a calculated call: I will invest this much time, money and psychic energy into cultivating this kind of excellence because I believe the optionality on the other end is worth it.
Compare that to how we treat junior bankers signing up for burnout, or traders courting ruin. There, our language shifts. We talk about “ambition” and “risk appetite.” We assume they know the game. We assume they own their choices.
The fact that the same people who romanticize long-hours work cultures as “grit” insist on infantilizing women who enter pageants tells you something simple. The problem is not exploitation. The problem is visible female self-commodification that does not ask for permission.
You can judge the tradeoff. But at least admit that it is a tradeoff, not a spell.
Female hierarchies and closed-door governance
Another thing that rarely makes it into the think pieces: look backstage.
Judges, coaches, former titleholders, mentors, choreographers, PR handlers. Pageant circuits are dense female networks with their own rulebooks, insider knowledge, initiation rituals and enforcement mechanisms.
The criteria are narrow. The politics can be ugly. But structurally, these are spaces where women create and manage their own hierarchies and economies. They decide what counts as improvement, what kind of narrative sells, which younger women to push forward, which sponsors to accept.
Is that a feminist utopia? No. It is a power system inside another power system. But dismissing it as simple patriarchy in sequins erases the fact that significant amounts of coordination, money and status move through channels that are, in practice, female run.
You do not have to like the values encoded there to notice that autonomy is not all or nothing. There is a difference between being pure object and being a participant in a game you did not design but can still work.
If you only recognize female agency when it manifests as rejection of beauty norms, you have not abolished patriarchy. You have just given it a better costume.
Harari’s vantage: imagined orders in miniature
Zoom out to the long view for a minute.
Harari talks about imagined orders: money, nations, corporations. Systems that exist because enough brains agree they exist.
Pageants are tiny but vivid instances of that machinery. A group of people agree that one woman, on one night, will symbolize the “nation” or “universe” or “ideal modern woman.” They invent a crown, a title, a contract. Suddenly that symbol unlocks real resources: sponsorships, seats at charity boards, invitations into political and commercial rooms.
No one truly believes that Miss Whatever literally embodies a country. Yet we behave as if she carries some distilled essence, enough to justify cameras and budgets.
Historically, communities always did this. Harvest queens. Chosen virgins. Courtiers hallmarked as “fairest” or “most worthy.” Humans keep picking bodies to stand in for abstractions they cannot see. It is how you turn foggy values into something you can point at.
If you want a compact model of how representation, myth and power interact, you could do worse than map the flow of status around a regional pageant. It is stupid. It is also a clean diagram of our species in action.
Han in the age of filters
Now drop back into the present and read the room through Byung-Chul Han.
We live in a society of exposure and self-exploitation. We curate, optimize, hustle. We treat the self as a project that never ends: new habits, new routines, new “selves” presented to different audiences. The commandment is no longer “obey” but “perform.”
Beauty pageants are not the cause of this. They are its analog prototype.
The contestant diets and rehearses for months to endure a few highly visible minutes. She has clear criteria, explicit judges and a date on the calendar when she will know how she scored.
The rest of us live inside a blurry, always-on version. Every post, every story, every Zoom call is a micro pageant, with invisible scoring and an algorithmic panel we never see.
We still claim to despise pageants as unnatural, even as we sleep inside a distributed one.
Look again at corporate “executive presence,” influencer aesthetics, TED-ready authenticity, curated activism. That is pageant logic networked and monetized. A steady pressure to be visibly optimized in a way that photographs well and offends no one important.
Pageants at least admit that all of this is work.
The plastic desert, revisited
Picture the stage again.
From the rafters, everything below looks slightly unreal. The light is too white. Skin becomes a kind of polished software. Movement loses its ordinary awkwardness and snaps into choreography. A small city of people has gathered around a bright rectangle where a few carefully prepared humans will be intensely visible for a short time.
For a minute it feels like standing on the edge of a plastic desert of curated humanity. Faces as icons. Bodies as interface elements. Humanity flattened and sharpened to slot neatly into the show.
It is tempting to laugh and walk out.
Then you open your phone in the parking lot and scroll through a feed of more curated faces, more optimized bodies, more tiny performances optimistically flung at an indifferent algorithm. The desert is bigger out here. The lighting is worse. The rules are opaque.
At least inside the arena, someone told you where the judges were sitting.
Taleb’s patience for charlatans runs out here
It is hard not to hear a Taleb-style snort when you read academics and commentators attacking pageants as uniquely corrupt.
These same people practice meticulous self-presentation. They have professional headshots, conference outfits, carefully manicured “online presence.” They pitch book proposals with cover concepts in mind. They adjust their accents, hair and glasses to fit the aesthetic of their tribe.
Their world has its own beauty standard. It just expresses as “looking like someone who belongs on this panel.”
When they target beauty pageants, they pick a low-status, high-visibility artifact and perform moral superiority at it. It costs them nothing. It changes nothing. It lets them pretend that their own pageants are pure because the stages are made of oak and the costumes are blazers.
Pageants are not less rigged. They are less hypocritical.
They admit that optics matter, that scripts are rehearsed, that the “spontaneous” answer has been drilled in front of a bathroom mirror. Anyone who has ever sat through a keynote knows the same is true there.
The only difference is who gets to call their spectacle serious.
The most honest dishonesty
None of this turns pageants into wholesome institutions. They still narrow beauty into punishing templates. They still amplify insecurity. They still sit comfortably inside consumer capitalism, selling transformation in installments.
But that is not why they are worth defending, coolly and without sentiment.
They are worth defending because they are unusually honest nodes in a dishonest network.
They say: human beings traffic in aesthetics. Beauty is real capital. Bodies can be cultivated as much as minds. Judging is always part instinct, part story, part luck. The game is unfair and people will play it anyway.
They formalize what the rest of the culture hides in the walls.
Where corporations smuggle aesthetic bias into “fit,” where politics smuggles it into “trust,” where media smuggles it into “relatability,” pageants pin it to a sash and walk it in a circle. They turn an unspoken social protocol into a literal scorecard.
If you want to change the protocol, you need to see it. If you want to see it, you could do worse than start here, in a room everyone has been trained to mock.
In a civilization that auditions constantly while preaching authenticity, that rewards polished surfaces while insisting it cares only about depth, beauty pageants are not the greatest lie.
So that’s why, Beauty Pageants are the most honest dishonesty in a culture built on the dishonest pursuit of honesty.