This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.ukdot UK. Now, although my mother always insisted that we stayed in

Lythms and hands for our summer holidays because it was well clean and respectable I

always knew even at the age of 11 that only a few miles down the road lay Sodham and Gomura.

Blackpool! And it wasn't the pier, all the fun fair, all the tower that exercised my imagination, but the Miss Blackpool contest.

Ah yes, all those beautiful, pneumatic, long-legged women in those skimpy bathing costumes,

just like the ones in the magazine that

Yates had once shown me in the bike shed. Well there is still a miss Blackpool

competition but the organizers now all seem to have taken courses on the

objectification of women and the ubiquity of the male gaze, and therefore are awfully careful to announce that the competitions are marked out at 20 for beauty, deportment, and personality. And beauty, I quote, does not refer to a particular size, shape,

or look.

The competition, again I quote, celebrates beauty and confidence without exploiting.

Mere words?

Well, a new research paper on Nigerian beauty pageants

nicely demonstrates the manner in which such contests can have multiple meanings for both observers and

for contestants.

That paper published in Africa, that's the Journal of the International African Institute,

is called Be Graceful, Patient, ever prayerful, negotiating femininity,

respect and the religious self in a Nigerian beauty pageant.

And its author is Juliet Gilbert, who's a lecturer in African Studies in anthropology at the University of Birmingham.

Julia, your paper suggests that all these beauty contests in Nigeria, that they're pretty aware of the

sort of objections to traditional beauty contest the idea of focusing on what we used to be called vital statistics

...