This is my 2-cents worth about the brouhaha on Miss Universe 2023.
And why we badly need, amid the hue and cry about her loss, a new perspective.
Michelle Dee, I agree, is a beautiful woman, and not only because of how she looks, but how beautiful she is inside. She is the complete woman. She has a cause worth fighting for. When she speaks, her soul speaks and that’s a beautiful thing in a woman.
In my humble opinion, and this is no expert opinion but a biased opinion on what makes a woman beautiful and without knowing the other women in the pageant because I’m seeing only her and the country is seeing only her, she should have cracked at least the Top 5.
Was she cheated or robbed?
Here is where the perspective comes from. This contest or any contest is not really about the best or the most beautiful woman, it’s a contest about who the judges liked the best. The JUDGES.
What the judges individually find beautiful in a woman. And what humans generally and individually find beautiful is so subjective and so mysterious and can be traced back all the way to childhood, our experiences and upbringing, where we were born, where we were raised, how we were raised, our love maps, our deprivations, our traumas, our memories, whom we fell in love with, even what our mothers and grandmothers looked like, our general likes and dislikes that each judge will have to narrow down whom he or she finds beautiful through this prism, through this volatile mix and soup of his or her own human and unique personalities so that in the end, you can’t predict who will win.
Each girl actually has a fair chance, anybody can win.
So if the judges change with every pageant, the judges’ personal criteria would also change. It’s anybody’s ball game.
The problem, I think, is that in recent years, the country grooms its representatives to beauty contests as if this arbitrary, very subjective process of choosing the most beautiful, could be reduced into a SCIENCE.
Backed by a whole team of walking experts, speaking experts, fashion experts, social media experts, we have turned these very unique, beautiful girls into a PRODUCT to be refined and marketed based on what product has the most chance of flying out of the shelves.
Except that this contest is not a science with a fool-proof formula to winning, and these girls are not products. But by treating them as such, they potentially lose what really makes them beautiful, their own unique soul that makes them different from the rest.
And worse, by declaring ourselves experts on pageantry, by expecting to win each and every time based on this so called expertise to turn women into winning products, we have turned the whole world against us. When the whole country goes into the fighting arena with the women who have gone into it as a personal battle to prove something for themselves, it’s practically provoking the world to cut us down to size and check our arrogance.
Let’s face it, everybody loves an underdog but in recent years, we have been sending delegates who are fully armed to the teeth by a whole team of experts who expect them to win. And we shout out to the world that we are the winners even before the votes are cast.
We have lost the underdog, dark horse advantage
We have lost the underdog, dark horse advantage. We think the country is supporting her, but the country is actually setting her up to lose because of our sheer sense of entitlement and arrogance. At the expense of really beautiful women and worthy candidates like Michelle Dee.
Did our previous Miss Universes win this way?
Our first two Miss Universes Gloria Diaz and Margarita Moran were not conventional beauties, were, in fact, unheralded winners who simply stood out and charmed through the sheer strength and beauty of their raw, unique, unprocessed personalities.
Miss Universe Gloria Diaz with Filipino designer Jose ‘Pitoy’ Moreno
They did not walk seductively. They did not even give brilliant answers that were meant to dazzle. They were simply themselves. How they are today remains who they were when they won Miss Universe. Still speaking their minds and projecting themselves in their own unique way. They didn’t remake themselves to suit what others wanted them to be. They remain unapolegetically who they are. And that simply resonated with those who looked at them before and who look at them now.
They were beautiful to watch then. Still beautiful to watch now. I saw Miss Diaz when she was in her late 40s, at a function, and she was a force of nature, sexy as hell just standing there. Just standing there. She was beside a very young Alice Dixon who had just won the pageant, but Dixon disappeared, was inconsequential beside Gloria Diaz.
I could not understand then how she won Miss Universe. But upon seeing her in person, I understood what a truly beautiful woman looks and feels like. My jaw dropped. That quality that set her apart, that very individual quality and energy remain as fresh today as when she had just won. It was and is no product of training or rehearsal, this quality that is riveting and captivating and just never gets old. It’s no made-to-order. You can’t give it to a girl. You can’t train for it. You either have it or you don’t.
Margie Moran, Gloria Diaz— It is not so much what they looked like. It’s who they are, down to their inner selves
Margarita “Margie” Moran, another unconventional beauty, has it too. I know many of my male contemporaries, decades younger than she, who were crushing on her. Her beauty, like Gloria Diaz’s, may not translate very well on TV, and perhaps would not be the standard now, but in person, up to well into her 50s, Margarita Moran has the presence and aloof beauty of a Helen of Troy who could launch a thousand ships.
Miss Universe Margarita ‘Margie’ Moran
It is not so much what they looked like. It’s who they are, down to their inner selves. And if it is true as studies show, that we, in fact, make decisions not based on what we think but based on what we feel, these women won because of what they made the judges feel.
My point: What makes a woman magnetically beautiful enough, likeable enough and loveable enough, to launch enough votes from the judges is different with every person and every judge, and ultimately something we cannot predict and we cannot train for.
There is no book-accounting for taste. There are betting odds, but there is no book-accounting who will win. Take Nicaragua, a country that has never produced a Miss Universe, with a delegate who presumably was not backed by a whole country or a whole team pressuring her to win. She was a candidate more likely going to lose than win. What would be the point of investing? It was not her country’s fight or battle but her own. Her own. And without the weight and pressure of the whole country’s expectations on her shoulder, she simply had fun and sashayed oh so lightly and without much difficulty on the way to the crown that we always fight so hard, so hard, to win.
Perhaps, when we send these girls to fight for the crown, it is time for the country not to be so invested, to simply get out of the way? Trust the girls, trust the process, and surrender the outcome to the universe? And most important, accept the outcome? Take Pia Wurtzbach, whom nobody really gave a snowball’s chance of winning the most prestigious beauty crown, when she could even barely manage to win the local crown. Practically on her own and sent off with the jeers of naysayers in her own country, she entered the contest with the lessons, the humility and the courage earned from her battle scars. An underdog from the start and without the pressure of expectations, she took charge of her own training and without fanfare, worked her way to the crown.
In contests such as the Miss Universe, it is not enough to tick all the items in the checklist and walk the right walk, in the right gown, and have the right statistics. It is not enough for the judges to like the woman for her to win. The judges must LOVE and worship and adore a woman no less to crown her queen. Pia won ultimately because the judges, according to the news, unanimously loved her. It still comes down to character.
Which brings us to our most famous Miss Universe Catriona Gray, considered the game changer of pageants and the yardstick against whom all will be judged. She also spawned a lot of copycats, her formula for winning analyzed as if all it took to win was a formula.
Miss Universe Catriona Gray
Was she the most prepared in the pageant? She was. Did her walk and her swimsuit and evening gown performance make a difference? Certainly. But ranged against candidates considered the best crop of candidates in Miss Universe history, who performed just as well, what stood out was her joy, her endless cheer, her spontaneity, her free spirit, and the sense that her beauty was only incidental; it was her heart that proved truly irresistible.
Watching Catriona onstage and listening to her talk and dance is like watching an innocent child at play
Watching Catriona onstage and listening to her talk and dance is like watching an innocent child at play. What’s not to love? She remains the most likeable, the most loveable Miss Universe we ever had.
Again, she did not rehearse it. Nobody gave it to her. It is all hers.
Without taking anything from Michelle Dee, who represented the Filipino and our country very well indeed, she is one beautiful woman we love. The judges simply loved other women better, which is par for the course.
The country has produced four Miss Universe and won many other beauty pageants, making us as one of the countries with the most beautiful women in the world. Our people are known for being the most loving, kindest, happiest people in the world.
One day, with or without our interference and maybe despite it, God willing and if it is her destiny, one of our own will win Miss Universe again. Given the kind of people and the remarkable women we have, it’s only a matter of time.
But perhaps next time, we give them the freedom and the space to represent not the Filipino, not the country, but only themselves.
Give them the spotlight for a change, let it be their fight, and not the country’s fight, and let them be truly themselves, and trust that their distinct, lovely Filipino character will come through and win the day, if not the crown.
