Beauty pageants do more good than harm

"To summerize this refutation, I will state that PhPr could not find any harm for beauty pageants, but instead listed all the bad effects of women suffering self esteem problems, problems that have always existed in all women – and all men, since pre-history, since everyday life has us competing for mates anyway, one of the criterion for mate competition being beauty. Nothing new here." AREA is right in that the harms I list for beauty pageants existed before beauty pageants and will exist even if there are never any more beauty pageants. My argument is that these harms, anorexia, bulimia, suicide, and dehumanization, are all made worse by beauty pageants. Every single refutation AREA offers against this argument is a straw man argument. My claim is much more reasonable and intuitive than AREA is making it out to be. If women parade themselves as barely clad pieces of meat in front of the entire nation it does two things. The first is that it establishes a monolithic, unattainable standard of beauty. AREA argues that there are multiple standards of beauty and that beauty pageants actually help create these different standards. While it may be true that there are some beauty pageants for "plus-sized" women, these sorts of pageants are not only much rarer than "traditional" beauty pageants but also receive much less attention. The vast majority of beauty pageants, and the most watched beauty pageants, are those who hold women to a standard of beauty which is thin, tall, blonde, and big chested. When was the last time that a woman under 5 foot or over 180 pounds won the Miss America pageant? To say that beauty pageants do not establish a high, monolithic standard of beauty is, at best, indicative of a profound misunderstanding of what beauty pageants are. Beauty pageants play a key role in establishing what society's collective standard of beauty. There of course has always been a collectively held ideal of beauty and people will always be predisposed to feel worse about themselves if they do not meet that standard. But that doesn't mean that we should embrace that practice. Establishing a singular, and unreachable, standard of beauty does nothing but increase the propensity for people to engage in self destructive practices because that standard is impossible to attain. My claim is not, as AREA makes it out to be, that because 99% of women cannot meet the standard perpetuated by beauty pageants 99% of women suffer from eating disorders and are suicidal, simply that 99% of women, because of beauty pageants, are at an increased risk of suffering from those problems. This has been empirically proven. With the increase in the prevalence and popularity of beauty standards there has also been a dramatic increase in eating disorders among those women most likely to participate in or watch beauty pageants: white middle-to-upper class women aged 16-25. The second thing that women parading themselves as meat does is encourages men to treat women as objects. My argument is not that men see women acting like objects in a pageant and then make a conscious choice to treat other women like objects. My argument is that beauty pageants contribute to a culture in which it is not only acceptable but desirable to treat women like objects. If beauty pageants are good and desirable things, as AREA advocates, then treating women like objects is a good and desirable thing because that is what every beauty pageant is. AREA then argues that it is not bad to treat women as objects because our bodies are objects. While our bodies are material objects there are problems with treating people as objects. When people are treated as objects they lose their rights and are used as means to others happiness. Specifically, when men are encouraged to view women as objects this increases the instance of violence against women and rape. The new argument AREA brings up about the government stopping all beauty pageants is irrelevant. I do not have to defend a ban on beauty pageants or any sort of government action, only that beauty pageants do more harm that good, the topic. The key issue in contention is "more good than harm." None of the supposed advantages to beauty pageants given by AREA come close to being able to overcome the harms of eating disorders, suicide, abuse, and rape. Even if beauty pageants only increase the chance of these problems a very small amount, that is more harm than whatever good beauty pageants can cause. If this speech seems like a restatement of my original arguments that is because it largely is. AREA's arguments were almost entirely non-responsive to my arguments and missed just the point. Perhaps clarifying in light of his misunderstandings will create a debate with more direct and relevant refutation and an easier debate to judge.