Beautiful Women

It was a couple of months ago when I was having lunch with a client at Little Italy near my office. There was a group of women seated at the table next to ours. I did not quite notice them at first. But then I suddenly realised that there were several cameramen actively taking pictures of those women. There was also someone apparently interviewing some of those women.

I then studied them for a bit. And the first thing I noticed was of course the heavy makeups on their faces; the clothes they wore—the kinds which are usually only seen on mannequins in the boutiques; and all those artificial behaviours, if you know what I mean.

Little did I know that I had a close encounter with the women from the "Search For A Supermodel" that day. It wasn't until I saw some of those pictures in the papers the next morning when I realised how models looked like in the real world.

It is strange, but if you asked any of those women how they maintain their figure, 10 to 1 will tell you that they hardly ever go on diet. They will say that they eat anything they like. It gives you the impression that they are born with the perfect figure, if there is such a thing as a "perfect figure"; that they are blessed with that figure perpetually. But truth be told, most, if not all of them, are extremely careful of what they eat, and they are perpetually counting calories. They end up becoming those slender-looking creatures with very, very flat chests which people describe as "sexy". And I bet if you asked them about boyfriends, they will almost automatically tell you that they don't have any! However, I did not see sexy women that day at Little Italy—merely skinny women, but what do I know! Somehow they looked good for the sole purpose of window dressing, y'know, to be displayed in a shop window?

I will admit that I am not a big fan of beauty contests. So I never really paid very much attention to the many beauty contests we've had in Sabah. But this lately, I think we're really overdoing this beauty contest thing. Within this year alone, I think we've had the Search of Supermodel (and Man Hunk—yuck!). We've had, I think, the Miss Tourism thing not too long ago. We had the Miss Sabah (for the Miss Malaysia). And of course we recently had the Unduk Ngadau—you know, those women with huge hair during the Keamatan Festival? And currently we're having the so-called Miss Earth Pageant.

I'm sure we have many beautiful women in Sabah, but what I myself saw that day at Little Italy weren't really beautiful women—or at least not beautiful to me. Could it be that we have been having too many beauty contests this lately to the extent that all of the really beautiful ones are no longer eligible to join?

We haven't even reached midyear yet and we have had so many beauty contests. Perhaps we should go easy on organising beauty contests, because after a while these mannequin-looking creatures all look the same! When all the truly beautiful ones are no longer eligible to compete, we are left with the not-so-beautiful ones (I'm trying to be kind here for not using a more suitable adjective). And then what could potentially happen is that we will have a beauty queen who hardly deserves to be described as "beautiful"—not even close! I'm just saying.