At dinner with some friends in the Pacific Northwest last night, I discovered that I had been preceded a few months ago by Derek Thomas who, in addition to rubbishing my taste in music, had strangely omitted to mention to my hosts his time as chief roadie for West Midlands band, Slade, in the 1970s.  Traumatic experiences with Noddy Holder and the boys turned him to Wagner.    Still, the conversation went well, and I enjoyed telling of how the English built all those castles in Wales "to protect the Welsh from themselves" and how Aristotle, in his Geographicon, Book 12, had argued that Wales was best understood as a defective form of England.

Still, the conversation then turned to the media-created "scandal" surrounding Miss California.  One of the strange things about this is surely the context: here we have a beauty queen being pilloried for making a statement that is deemed by the liberal avant garde of the culture (as represented by one of the judges, I believe) to be somewhat stone age and out of touch.  Whoa there, not so fast.  Sir, this is a "beauty contest".  Were these things not dismissed by the feminists as stone age some twenty or thirty years ago?  Is the whole premise not to parade women as some form of attractive eye candy or cattle, to be gazed at and leered at by the audience?  It surely doesn't get more stone aged than that.  If the gay guy in the judging panel doesn't want to be offended by sexism and illiberal attitudes, then surely he shouldn't take  money for participating in something which, in its very essence, objectifies women as sex objects.

Or am I missing something here?  Is the most disturbing part of the whole debacle neither the comments of Miss California (with which both myself and, I believe, that well-known reactionary, President Obama, agree) nor the faux outrage and the bully boy tactics now being used to make this poor girl's life a misery?  Is it perhaps the re-embrace of beauty pageants by the cultural and policital avant garde that represents the most interesting and sinister part of this?  This is arguably part and parcel of the strange realignments taking place, where sex appeal is now seen as a source of power -- in its mildest and most trivial form, a swimsuit contest with a liberal, gay judge, in its most malicious form, the feminist embrace of pornography and prostitution as forms of female empowerment.   That the gay guy got upset and carried so much political and cultural clout is worrying; that he was there in the first place and saw no problem with the pageant in principle is more worrying still.  Frankly, he's the one the media should be bashing at this point for encouraging women to make themselves sex objects.  That's pretty illiberal behaviour, you'd have thought.