Source 6: Religious fury alters Miss World in Indonesia

1.     Quiano, Kathy. “Religious Fury Alters Miss World in Indonesia.” CNN. CNN, 27 September 2013. Web. 14 October 2013.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/world/asia/miss-world-pageant/

2. When I began searching for the next few sources for my topic, I though perhaps I wanted to revisit two the biggest topics in my research: Miss America and Miss World. Lucky for me, both pageants have had some big media exposure and controversy in recent events! Looking through my old resources, I realized that I had news sites but I didn’t have ones that I knew very well (i.e I hardly read the Huffington Post or Jakarta News) so I decided that CNN would be a great resource. Personally, CNN has been good with their news.

What struck me the most about this particular article was that it was a lengthy in comparison to the others ones I have found. It details how the protests of Muslim communities took what was supposed to be a fun night for women to dress up and dragged politics into it. I think this fundamentally supports one of my questions: do pageants bring issues to the forefront of people’s thoughts? In this case, are beauty pageants religiously degrading?

3.) “Demeaning, exploitative, degrading. Beauty pageants have been called lots of things.”

“Islamic groups urged the government to shut the contest down. Hardliners burned signs featuring the image of last year's winner Wenxia Yu of China that read "Reject Miss World." They also presented what they deemed as appropriate attire for beauty contestants -- long dresses and full head scarves.”

“Miss World's 127 contestants competed in beach fashion, fitness, world fashion, talent and "Beauty with a Purpose" meant to honor charitable work.”

“"It's only beauty, beauty and beauty, but also body, body and body, so that's why we consider it as a contest that exploits women physically," said Ismail Yusanto, spokesman of Indonesia's Hizbut Tahrir, a conservative Islamic group.”

4.) This time around, I wanted to get a head start on researching topics that where pro-pageant. However, this is probably an article that is less about pro-pageant and more about why these communities are anti-pageant. Admittedly, I was trying to keep my mindset as pro-pageant, but some of the quotes in the article made me think how awful pageants can really be. I guess in the end, I realized after some time that these communities are very conservative… which to me is a bit archaic. Miss World is trying to get the world to come together in good competition and promote relations, and these protests while understandable, is a bit to a lot backwards.