Tel-Chai Nation

I recently spoke about the cancellation of the Miss Israel pageant, and the dismay I felt when I saw some apparent feminists bought into the whole sex-negative narrative being fed by SJWs in the USA, using that to justify terminating it on those grounds. Well that's why I think they should take a look at what veteran actress/model Pamela Anderson had to say in her new biography, which provides a very valid belief that perfectly counters theirs:

There's a strand of feminism that detests the "objectification" of women in entertainment through the "male gaze." They say this patriarchal lens employs masculine desire (think: sex symbol) to diminish the importance of a female character. Pamela Anderson's legendary career as a model, television star, and political activist sends a message to those who see the world that way: Kiss my empowered rack.

Anderson likes to joke that her "breasts had a career of their own and I was just tagging along." So, it might surprise you to learn that the blonde bombshell was a childish tomboy who loved playing with "anything that creeped and crawled." She was a "complete contrast" with her mother, who was cut from a cosmetic cloth. She would tell young Pamela that there was "no excuse not to look good" and "no such thing as natural beauty." Being a looker required hard work and mirror time. This maternal glamour rationale went beyond vanity: "You are more powerful if you're pretty."

It should also be noted that Anderson, much like Abargil, was victim of a terrible experience:

Anderson grew up in a small Canadian town. Her father was loving but flawed by anger and abuse. At one point she watches in horror as he tosses her kittens in a bag and drowns them. She is molested by a babysitter and raped at 12 years old by a man nearly twice her age. After high school, she gets out of Dodge and moves to Vancouver.

On this note, Abargil was victim of an Israeli travel agent working in Italy circa 1998, Uri Shlomo Nur, who raped her in his car at knifepoint. An absolutely repulsive act that he almost got away with, because Italian police decided there wasn't enough evidence. Thankfully, Abargil was able to receive aid from Israeli police, who managed to arrest Nur when he came on a flight to Israel himself, and he received a 16 year prison sentence.

Like Abargil years before, Anderson didn't let the assault she experienced destroy her life and view of sexuality going forward. And that's exactly why it's decidedly very sad if Abargil is succumbing to modern PC and implying beauty pageants were ever a mistake to start with. The same goes for Sharlin and Klein, if they believe wearing a bikini and being intelligent are throughly incompatible. And on that note, at the end of the Free Beacon book review, it says:

Pamela rejects the idea that "being sexy" should "conflict with intelligence." Her own mother impressed on her that being pretty can make you more powerful. She found great success in life leveraging that ethos to further causes she believes in: "If a cartoon image of me was what got me through the door, so be it."

On that, she's right. Why, if you think about it a bit, it's possible to structure "cartoony" as a compliment, by making it synonymous with "sexy". In any event, I think Abargil, Sharlin and Klein owe an apology to all the pretty ladies out there who're going to be stung by their poor statements. And while it's definitely abominable what Abargil went through, I noticed this old 2009 report, which says:

Despite the agony she has gone through, Abargil refuses to believe that rapists are evil people.

“They are human beings that have a big, big problem,” she says. “But they are not villains at all. They can be anyone.”

What?!? Seriously, this is a very ill-advised viewpoint to take, especially in a day and age where both Islamofascism and leftism have enabled sexual violence. What Abargil went through was utterly obscene, and she was lucky to survive. But that's exactly why it's regrettable she made that statement, and doubly so if she still retains it 14 years later. Just recently, Scotland was rocked by the transsexual scandal where the now ex-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon approved of putting a biological male rapist in a woman's prison. In a manner of speaking, rapists can be "anyone", but that's exactly why they can't be awarded privileges that enable them to continue committing crimes. On which note, I hope Abargil, who's now religiously observant, knows how bad it'd look if she came within even miles of taking a lenient view of LGBT ideology. At the same time, if she doesn't have the courage to speak out on these specific issues, that too is a serious weakness and quite telling for somebody who says she's concerned for women's rights and dignity.

As far as I'm concerned, Anderson is the one I'm siding with here, and the 3 former Miss Israel contestants decidedly owe an apology for taking positions that insult intellects. What they said only furthers the considerable damage being done to women's dignity these days, by saying exactly what SJWs want to hear, and they'd do well to come off it.

Update: as is noted in this film festival review about her documentary Brave Miss World, Abargil later became ultra-Orthodox, so her previous declaration that beauty pageants are mistakes should be no surprise. Seriously, I'm also disappointed, because such positions don't solve these problems, and practically end up doing what predators wouldn't mind happening one bit. Did that ever occur to any of these folks?

Labels: Canada, Israel, Italy, misogyny, Moonbattery, sexual violence, showbiz, United States