Discerning The Devil In Miss Curvy Uganda
If controversy is good for publicity, then the Miss Curvy contest and junior minister for tourism Godfrey Kiwanda have really scored high on it for the past close to three weeks.
Both conventional and new media are awash with stories, opinions, pictures, and statements either in support or in contravention of the whole concept of Miss Curvy.
In my opinion, it is immaterial as to whether; it is a project of the ministry of tourism or a private sector initiated project and only got a nod of approval from Mr. Kiwanda. For a minute let me join in the frenzy of annotation on the Miss Curvy Uganda.
Many justifications and counter-justifications have been read, posted, and the debate up to now carries on especially on social media.
Among the many issues raised, the issue of objectifying Women has been resounded enough and need no further amplification.
The question of morality in itself as it relates to the promotion of sex tourism is subject to debate and throws a broader question of the morality of all beauty pageants ever known on earth.
On the other hand, the Minister shoots back with a defense that it is not his ministry that crafted the miss curvy project rather he was invited to launch it.
Secondly, it is meant to boost tourism in terms of being proud of ourselves and our nature as Africans.
True as it may be, the minds behind this pageant have erred in one fact; that there are as many curvaceous women as there are women without curves in Uganda or Africa. The yardstick at which the organizers depended to draw conclusions that all Ugandan women by nature are curvy has not been statistically vindicated yet.
With all the evils that it may come along with, is the issue of trauma and or stereotype caused to those who may not be considered a representation of African beauty or Ugandan Beauty per se.
The real devil is in detail here. There are many tribes in Uganda that physically due to the foods they eat, their genes according to ancient anthropological studies, according to their environment and terrestrial landscape have less or no “curved” bodies. What shall befall of such tribes? Obviously, the stereotype that they don’t measure to the verdicts of society to fit into the yardsticks of the beauty of a woman as advanced by the organizers of miss curvy Uganda.
Further to that, the family especially the marriage component of it is going to be affected deeply. Men and Women shall equally be affected. To the Men who already married the “not curvy” must definitely already be feeling the trauma of it. The loss of self-esteem by mere imagination that their wives are not at the accepted standards.
True to its prediction, Uganda must brace herself to artificially created “curves” and companies that claim to enlarge women’s hips and other body parts shall multiply because the market has been created for them, and the side effects of hormonal manipulation pills and tablets definitely causing cancers have been given a green light.
Currently, despite the institution of the ministry of ethics and integrity, plus the enactment of the Anti-pornography Act, 2014; Pornography sites are the fifth (5th) most viewed internet sites according to Google ratings.
Meaning that we are grappling with a society sinking so low to immorality. And according to the Annual crime report of 2017 by the Uganda Police force, Sex-Related Crimes come in 3rd to top the list of most committed crimes in Uganda after thefts and others termed as ‘other crimes in general’.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Kiwanda has postured government as the number one promoter instead of it defending and protecting her own people from harmful practices that have come to disorient society into self-destruction.
No Ugandan would want to show that in reality, we believe that curves are the true representation of endowments of Uganda. We have background aesthetic principles, even if we rarely articulate them and are correspondingly very aware of moments when our tastes might clash with those of another; but when we use the phrase Miss Curvy, as a representation of Uganda Women, we seem to mean that there should not be an intelligent disagreement around aesthetics and that we don’t feel comfortable about asserting the superiority of any one shape of any female being over another.
It implies an acute failure of sensitivity to conflict of choice and without any fear of being rude or mean to others: what we actually are saying is that the true description of beauty is in the curves of women, yet one would sensibly aver that beauty of Ugandans is an idiosyncratic matter. There is definitely a lot at stake than the expected dividends of what the Minister is trying to rally support for.
More so, the Miss Curvy, denies the assertion of the rights of a section of people to follow their enthusiasms at and after such a time when these high handed beauty experts hold cultural reins and try to shape taste with stern and belittling authority. Kiwanda and company are in other words telling people what to like and treat with dissent and disdain what does not pass the description of Ugandan Women beauty as per their yardstick.
Africans have grappled enough with western influenced definitions of beauty, and have shared enough of the wallops of trying to fit into such metaphors; like brown is beautiful and thus bleaching of some women, small/petite is beautiful and hence slimming, artificial hair pieces, etc. Is Africa, or Uganda ready to fix up a fallen society and generations of daughters and sons who shall struggle to measure up to Kiwanda’s description of beauty?
It is indeed an extremist intolerance on the side of the minister and his partners to move into the categorization of their own Daughters, Nieces, Wives, Mothers, Aunties, Associates etc.
It is my ecclesiastical call upon Kiwanda and his partners in the Miss Curvy pageant; that Stop badgering us into submission. Let people have the freedom to think and feel as they like. Even the argument that it is building confidence among curvy women is just a scapegoat, rather what is of essence is that the organizers are stuck to a so-called liberating move for African Women, yet in an actual sense creating snobbery and closing conversation down to public or pageant influenced perceptions rather than personal appreciation and judgment.
