ON MALAYSIAN BEAUTY CONTEST-BANNING

DIFFICULT DIALOGUE #1:
"on female beauty contests"

In Malaysia now, Muslim women are not allowed/being fatwa-ized to enter beauty contests the rationale being that God's "gift of beauty" cannot be paraded and be allowed to perhaps be exploited and used by, for lack of a better word, "capitalists" capitalizing on beauty for the purpose of selling eveything from "bedak sejuk", "women-moustache remover", "digital eye-brow plucker" to "swimming suits" to "lean but mean cuisine" ...

the logic is you may be beautiful but you may not enter the meritocracy game and use your beauty for a ticket to showbiz stardom such one traversed by Yasmin Yusuf, Michelle Yeoh, (or the younger Mak Enon)

.. in Iran and many other anti-beauty-contest countries you are all covered-up if you are a female. what if beauty is the only thing you think you have to harness and exploit and promote as a career path, knowing that you have the confidence of making it big and making a living out of it and that the capitalist system actually allows one to do it and it is not against the Constitution?

- what say you about "male-beauty contest" a.k.a. body-building?

what would Malek Nor "Malaysia's own Smiling Arnie-the Terminator-Schwarzenegger" or Saloman Esmanto the "Malaysian-Javanese Iron Man" of the 70s say? They paraded themselves and wore Superman-like underwear for the world to see, didn't they? were they fatwas on them?

shouldn't men too be a protceted specie in society -- adhering to such a standard of modesty?

I am all so confused ... as I watch the giggling moon over Manhattan ... --ar