Judging women--it's a cultural thing. I wouldn't understand.

This might come across as one of those "me so feminist" posts, but I found it interesting that Saudi Arabia has its own answer to the western beauty pageant--"Miss Beautiful Morals." I don't exactly get the point, but they judge a variety of young women on how much they respect and are devoted to their parents. Hmm. And yet, I don't necessarily think it's all that much weirder than our western contests that judge external beauty.

In both contests, there is an arbitrary ideal set up of what the young woman should be. Either she should be very modest and obedient and chaste and so on, or she should answer to a fairly rigorous standard of beauty, possess a "talent" (trainable) and answer questions in such a way as to suggest one has a good understanding of what people want to hear.

What I found very interesting about the Saudi version, is this:

Pageant hopefuls will also spend a day at a country house with their mothers, where they will be observed by female judges and graded on how they interact with their mothers, al-Mubarak said. Since the pageant is not televised and no men are involved, contestants can take off the veils and black figure-hiding abayas they always wear in public.

The Miss Beautiful Morals pageant is the latest example of conservative Muslims co-opting Western-style formats to spread their message in the face of the onslaught of foreign influences flooding the region through the Internet and satellite television.

A newly created Islamic music channel owned by an Egyptian businessman aired an "American Idol"-style contest for religious-themed singers this month. And several Muslim preachers have become talk-show celebrities by adopting an informal, almost Oprah-like television style, in contrast to the solemn clerics who traditionally appear in the media.

Unlike western beauty contests, where the judging is often by men, the judging is done by women--although they are women who may have always imbibed a patriarchal p.o.v. But also, I can see where it might be a way for young women to express themselves in a way, and also, part of me wonders if there isn't something "less superficial" in looking at character of the participants instead of attractiveness, even while I suspect that the standards of what "beautiful morals" consists of are just as artificial as our western standards of beauty--

In other words, I'm a little conflicted. It's a different kind of contest, but I think it's different in the same old way, where women are held to some ideal and found wanting.

But I still find the kind of cross-cultural hybrids that spring up where East meets West interesting. The idea of tv shows in the middle east being mirrors of ours makes me aware of how much in common people have, regardless of different backgrounds. At the risk of sounding like Thomas Friedman remarking on a flat world--well, yeah. We aren't all that different.