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Name: Sarah Liu
Course: RW6
Instructor: Lina
Date: Monday 03/12/2012
Assignment: Synthesis essay

BEAUTY CONTESTS Beauty contests are popular in different countries around the world. The Miss World competition, biggest beauty contest in the world, has been running year in year out since 1951. From the official data statistics (http://www.missworld.com/), the first Miss World procession welcomed a global audience much greater than international events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games. There are beauty contests for different kinds of categories included sex, age and sexuality. This essay especially focuses on adult women’s beauty contests as undoubtable the most popular and prominence version. A great number of people think that the beauty contest is good for individuals and the society because it confirms a standard type of beauty. Nevertheless, contrary to the abovementioned statement, I strongly believe that the beauty contests have adverse effects.

First of all, beauty contests unify concept of beauty and sometimes the concept is superficial. There are two arguements support this point of view. One was raised in a book written in 1991 which caused a phenomenon upon publication: The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf. Wolf theorizes a cause-and-effect relationship between women's liberation and society's ideal of beauty. Although females have already advanced and more open minded than before, Wolf resists that, "in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers." Why people hold this value or why this thought appears in the modern society is because of how "cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us." Briefly, the ideal of women’s beauty dominates contemporary women in all probability which did not experienced by former generations. Therefore, feminist Jo Freeman wrote in the 1968 protest No More Miss America, "All
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