The Miss Universe competition! In an era where women have made significant strides across science, politics, business, and culture, it remains surprising that a global pageant continues to frame female achievement through physical display.
The contestants are asked to articulate their views and demonstrate intellect; however, the underlying structure still relies on spectacle, and women are primarily presented, judged, and ranked through their appearance.
While global perceptions of beauty have undeniably broadened, moving beyond the narrow, porcelain-doll ideal to embrace deeply melaninated and diverse forms of beauty, long-standing stereotypes continue to exert a powerful gravitational pull. They draw women back into a pageant format still rooted in historical notions of worth, visibility, and external validation.
In 2025, the controversy deepened when reports emerged of an incident involving the pageant’s organiser and Miss Mexico, during which he allegedly directed verbal abuse at the contestant. According to multiple accounts, the exchange prompted Miss Mexico to withdraw from the competition, a decision that drew widespread public attention and raised serious questions about the culture within the pageant’s leadership.
The incident also revived long-standing allegations and rumours surrounding the organiser, including claims related to trafficking that have circulated in the media and public discourse over the years. Complicating the narrative further were public interpretations that Miss Mexico’s stance reflected a certain advantage: the mental acuity, access to information, and the courage required to speak the truth.
While such readings remain interpretive rather than verifiable, they raise an important point: a woman’s capacity to dissent within highly regulated global platforms is shaped less by status and more by clarity of thought, awareness, and moral resolve.
Seen in context, the incident involving Miss Mexico is not an isolated failure of individual conduct, but a reflection of the deeper architecture of beauty pageants themselves. The Miss Universe competition was founded in 1952, a time when business and media profited by exploiting women as visual entertainment. Femininity was marketed, packaged and sold in advertising and for male approval.
At its inception, the pageant positioned women as representatives of national pride while subjecting them psychologically to private systems of control, contractual obedience, and hierarchical judgment.
The system reminds me of the unmistakable imprint of inherited bigotry. Groups that were once subjected to discrimination and forced labour as commoners in Europe carried those same hierarchical logics into other continents, recreating serf-like systems in Africa, Australia, and the Americas. In this context, invoking white privilege as a conscious justification for bigotry reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the term itself, which was intended to describe unconscious, structural advantage, very similar to the setting up of pageants.
Though the competition has since incorporated the language of empowerment, advocacy, and intellect, its foundational logic remains largely intact; women are still curated, disciplined, and evaluated within a framework that privileges appearance and compliance. Like colonisation and slavery, a great deal has changed in words, but the fundamental systems remain the same.
Many contestants enter with clear intentions: visibility, scholarships, career access, or a platform for causes they care deeply about. In a world that continues to reward women’s bodies more readily than their labour, pageants can appear as pragmatic, if imperfect, avenues to opportunity. Yet individual agency operates within structural limits. When advancement is tethered to appearance, obedience, and silence in the face of misconduct, choice becomes constrained.
Controversy did not end there. During one of the live segments, another contestant; Ms. Jamaica, Dr. Gabrielle Henry, suffered a visible fall while walking on stage. The moment, captured and circulated widely online, raised concerns about stage safety, production standards, and the pressures placed on contestants to perform flawlessly under physically demanding conditions. This served as a stark reminder of the risks embedded in a spectacle that prioritises visual perfection and pace over the well-being of the women participating in it.
The question, then, is not simply why women still participate in pageants, but under what conditions that participation occurs. Agency and coercion are not opposites; they often coexist. Many contestants enter willingly, fully aware of the compromises involved, because the alternatives offered to women, particularly those from less-resourced backgrounds, are limited. Visibility, mobility, and access remain unevenly distributed, and pageants continue to promise a shortcut through those barriers. When a system rewards compliance, aesthetic conformity, and silence while penalising dissent, participation can no longer be read as pure choice. It is a negotiation shaped by power, scarcity, and the enduring expectation that women must adapt themselves to flawed institutions to be seen.
The question, then, facing pageants like Miss Universe is no longer how they can be restructured, but whether they remain relevant at all. A world that has learned to value women’s leadership, creativity, labour, and intellect does not need a staged hierarchy of bodies to validate female worth.
Platforms for visibility now exist, which do not require women to submit to spectacle or silence in exchange for opportunity. When an institution must repeatedly rebrand itself to mask its original logic, perhaps the most honest response is to acknowledge that beauty pageants, as they are currently structured, have reached the end of their cultural usefulness.
Muthoni Thangwa 