Hotmao

A row in London is showing that even 21st century feminists conform to the Millie Tant stereotype of hairy, obese, tampon-throwing dykeyness. The Miss University London beauty queen contest has caused quite a stink in today’s media with Krishnan Guru-Murthy (so butch) going all Paxman on one of the teenage organisers while the Daily Mail laments that today’s students “would rather fight to be crowned campus beauty queen than battle for women’s rights.”

The big issue appears to be that these students are betraying women’s solidarity and the hard-won rights of feminism by wearing nice dresses and having their hair done and conforming to an idealistic Western sense of what constitutes beauty. As Guru-Murthy put it so tactfully “Were any large girls allowed to compete?”

The point that people like Guru-Murthy are missing is that the students are completely right to describe themselves as “post-feminists.” Any movement for freedom has to be essentially about giving a downtrodden minority the right to choose how they live. Therefore by insisting that these young women should be banned from appearing in a beauty contest the feminists are taking over the whip-hand from the men by pursuing their own agenda about how a woman should behave.

By standing up to the militants and the media the students entering in the competition are actually making a statement about a woman’s right to choose how to live and are the real feminists in this case.

It is institutions such as the LSE with its outdated posts such as women’s officer, or the media who can’t grasp young people embracing their own liberty, which are holding back the sexes from real equality. Entertainingly the Mail looked back nostalgically to the 60’s when London universities where the hot-bed of women’s rights probably just as many a chap living through the 60s looked back wistfully 40 years before to a time when his wife would just shut up and make the tea.