In case you’ve been living in a lead-lined locker at the bottom of the ocean, Miss Jamaica Universe winner, Yendi Phillips, placed second in the Miss Universe pageant held recently in Las Vegas, Nevada. This is a historic achievement for Jamaica, as this is the highest that any pageant queen Miss Jamaica Universe from my lovely island has ever placed.

On the night of Miss Universe, many Jamaicans were glued to their televisions AND, of course, to Twitter. I’m not really a fan of pageants – go figure, I spent the evening playing Sims 3 instead – so I was blissfully unaware of the explosion of live commentary bloating my timeline to the size of a Beluga whale. This was intentional … as I said, I’m not a pageantry fan.

The explosion itself has reached its climax and now the dust is settling. In the midst of the rubble – so to speak – many bloggers and Tweeters have been examining the real reason behind Yendi’s win – or loss, depending on how you look at the glass, I guess.

Yesterday, @cucumberjuice shared a rather thought-provoking blog post on Twitter. I read through it and immediately it resonated with me. In case you can’t bother to move your cursor to click on the link, here’s the summary…

BrooklynSoul, blogger at http://ruminations-of-a-brooklyn-soul.blogspot.com joined the rest of the pageant spectators and tuned in to the Miss Universe pageant on the telly. Her partner pointed out that Yendi looked like any other light-skinned Jamaican girl – which I’m not going to entirely disagree with, by the way. Yendi is BEAUTIFUL but…anyways, let me continue this summary, eh?

BrooklynSoul has pointed out what many of us either already know, choose to ignore, accept or are completely ignorant of – Miss Jamaica Universe, for many years, fit’s a specific template: “…straight or wavy, swimmers body, leggy, such aesthetics bequeathed so lovingly from their White, Indian, Chinese, Lebanese half, and worshiped by Kinsley Cooper, Pulse Modeling Agency.”

I really don’t care how much you want to protest and bring up Zahra Redwood and April Jackson (these two beauties were the exception to the rule) but it’s TRUE. Check out the list of Miss Jamaica Universe alumni if you opt to disbelieve me: Sandra Foster, Kimberly Mais, Christine Straw, Christine Wright, Sanya Hughes and Carolyn Yapp.

Now, here’s my disclaimer: ALL of these women are beautiful. Every single one of them – there is no denying that. However, with the exception of Zahra and April, they ALL fit into a specific cookie-cutter template for the Miss Jamaica Universe face. And, as Brooklyn Soul’s partner rightfully said, their faces kind of all blend into each other after awhile and you really can’t tell them apart on your first memory scan – unless, of course, you’re really into the world of pageantry.

Jamaica is an island full of dynamism – our culture is the result of one big melting pot of several other cultures! There’s no such thing as a ‘straight’ Jamaican…really. We’re all the product of a unique combination of different races and cultures. But, I digress…

The average Jamaican woman does not look like our past Miss Jamaica Universe winners. In fact, most of us cannot visually identify with them and – in the most dire of instances, many of us – desperate to fit the mould – go to great extremes. Some of these, as you can well imagine, include skin-lightening (aka bleaching), cosmetic surgery (yes, these do happen more often than you’d think), wearing extensions (aka weaves) to mimic that curly-when-wet or European straight look (bear in mind, I’m not lashing out against weaves, I personally enjoy experimenting with them on occasion!) and the list goes on…

This morning, I shared BrooklynSoul’s post with @fyrfli and she immediately posited this question: “are beauty contestants supposed to represent the nation as a whole? or the most beautiful and refined women of our nation?” which I then, of course, put to my followers on Twitter. Here are some of the responses I got:

Each of the responses have been interesting to read – especially fellow blogger @corvedacosta’s multitude of replies (#blamethe140charslimitonTwitter!). I find Corve to be quite fashion-conscious and very aware of that particular industry – he’s also a #TeamYendi stan! Despite the fact – he’s been quite impartial in his responses and has posited that beauty pageants are a sham…asking “it weird no short hair, fat, natural hair girl has never won?”. I agree it IS weird but..is it, really?

If it’s a beauty pageant, and beauty is – as the adage goes – in the eyes of the beholder, then whose conception of beauty are we working with here? The nation’s? The judges’? The Miss Universe production team’s?

Then there is @fyrfli’s response, which REALLY was quite poignant. There are far more important issues to be dealt with than beauty pageants. As I said this morning to her, Jamaica tends to remind me of a psychiatric patient on the couch with a shrink. There are a myriad of issues for the patient to sort through and, after acknowledging the fact, the shrink encourages the patient to do so. However, instead of tackling the core issues – from which the other ones spring and gain life – the patient tackles them helter-skelter…not quite getting anything done, although exerting loads of effort.

This post, though, is about beauty pageants and the concept of beauty in Jamaica – so I will leave the heavier stuff for another post.

Now, Jamaicans are fiercely independent people – am I right? Of course I am! So why are we competing in a pageant on the basis of someone else’s concept of beauty? I don’t get it…I love my country to death…but we really need to wipe the crust from our eyes and take a good long look at ourselves and decide if we’re going to:

a) continue to compete in pageants based on another culture’s POV of beauty;

b) do a) AND then allow the rest of our citizenry to believe that because of participating in a) ‘beauty’ is defined by someone ELSE – I.e. outside our nation or;

c) decide to exclude ourselves from a) and focus on uplifting our nation, reminding us that our unique combinations is what makes us a beautiful country.

I don’t even know. I’m going to have coffee.

I may come back and add to this post…we’ll see.

Edit: Just ran into this post by @corvedacosta “The Case for and Against Yendi Phillips” . Quite an interesting read – and very insightful. As I said, Corve *gets* it – me? I’m not quite so sure, yet.

AND make sure you check out @ElvaJamaica‘s article in today’s Jamaica Observer Splash magazine “Yendi – My Miss Jamaica Universe”. Also insightful and hilarious (if you don’t fall out of your chair when you see ‘Cassava Powell’, you’re ill…I swear! Yendi sure is getting a LOT of love from Jamaicans at home and abroad – it’s beautiful to see, even if she didn’t take home the Miss Universe crown!

DISCLAIMER: Neither @corvedacosta nor myself are bashing Yendi at all or trying to take away her rightfully earned accolade…So if you’re going to comment here or there with anything to that very vague effect…why bother?