In this post-feminist landscape, beauty contests are more about displaying a united spirit of sisterhood than anything else – well, that and attacking your competitors with pepper spray to stop them winning, as Ingrid Marie Rivera has found out.
Ingrid Marie Rivera, you see, is going to be Puerto Rico's representative at next year's Miss Universe competition. But her journey has been fraught with more peril than anyone could have imagined because rather than Vaseline her teeth and make up a lot of bullshit about animals like all other wannabe Miss Universes do, Ingrid Marie Rivera had to cope with someone sabotaging her clothes and make-up with pepper spray before the show began. And by struggling through the pageant covered in hives and emerging as Miss Puerto Rico, Ingrid Marie Rivera has proved that nothing can stand before her ultimate goal of wearing a sash, smiling subordinately and being found attractive by Donald Trump for a year.
You might think that beauty contests are nothing more than awkward anachronisms that merely reduce women to subservient objects of male desire while offering the illusion of empowerment judged on nothing more than a series of intergenerational genetic flukes, but you would say that wouldn't you, fatty?
Because even though beauty contests are just jumped-up dog shows where you don't feel as suicidal if you find the winner attractive, people go crazy for them. Especially Miss Universe, where previous winners have subjected themselves to dresses made of chains and relentless Mexican jeers just so they can win the ultimate prize of being called the prettiest girl in the universe, travelling to hopeless war-torn environments to inspire the locals with their beauty and getting drunk, taking drugs and banging all the men.
And people will do anything to even compete in Miss Universe – anything, it's transpired, including sabotaging your competitors with pepper spray attacks before they're due to go onstage.
That's what's happened in Puerto Rico, anyway – on Friday's beauty contest to find Puerto Rico's representative for Miss Universe 2008, the ultimate winner Ingrid Marie Rivera was forced to keep running backstage to change clothes and ice her face to stop it from swelling up, all because someone had doused her clothes and make-up with pepper spray. After she won, and revealed the torment she'd been through, Ingrid Marie Rivera said:
"It was a lot of sacrifice, and my tears were genuine. At one point, I asked, 'Am I a masochist?' But I said regardless of the results, this is my goal. The more rocks there are in my path, the more thanks I will give to God for sustaining me."
There's currently an investigation into who would dream of attempting to wreck Ingrid Marie Riviera's hope of winning the Miss Puerto Rico crown by covering her with pepper spray, and investigators have narrowed the culprit down to either a team member of one of Riviera's competitors or Dennis The Menace from The Beano.
And not only was there the pepper spray that Ingrid Marie Rivera had to endure, but also her bags and credit cards were reportedly stolen and a bomb threat cancelled some of the Miss Puerto Rico preliminary rounds.
But while the investigation into this sabotage continues, some important questions have to be asked. Like what would compel someone to cause another human being so much distress just because they might be slightly prettier than them? Is it a reflection of the increasingly competitive world we live in, or is it a sign that the media constantly inflicts unattainably high ideals on us that destroy our self-confidence as a result of our failure to meet them?
But perhaps the most important question is this: how frighteningly ugly must the other Puerto Rican beauty queens have been to let sobby old Ingrid Marie Rivera and her welty face win Miss Puerto Rico? We're guessing 'quite'.
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