As Miss World Turns

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.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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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.