Miss France 2024, chosen with her short hair, says women’s “diversity”

Posted by: 17/12/2023 – 12:16

4 million

Miss Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Miss France 2024, was elected on Saturday evening in Dijon, in front of 5,000 fans who still believe in the “fairytale” in the face of accusations of a “sexist” competition, which was further reinforced by the latest court ruling. 2018 Punishment for topless pictures of candidates.

Eve Gilles, 20, originally from Dunkirk, turned her candidacy into a symbol of female “diversity”. “Don’t let anyone dictate who you are,” she declared during the beauty pageant, distinguishing herself from the other misses with her short-cut hair, long hair.

The new “Beauty Queen”, succeeding Indira Ampiot – Miss Guadalupe – was chosen by the audience for half of the ratings, and for the other half by a jury of seven women. 76 years old and in the words of host Jean-Pierre Foucault since 1995, the young woman was elected after a great “performance”.

“It makes me dream! Ever since I was little, I haven’t missed a single festival”, testified 22-year-old Emma from Dijon, who came to attend the pageant in her city instead of finally attending it. That’s on TF1. “The Misses are incredibly lucky. It’s a fairytale,” said her friend Sylvie, 23, still unable to settle into her seat in the Zenith auditorium.

However, the competition comes after a Lille court conviction on Tuesday against TF1 subsidiary e-TF1 and Endemol, which managed Miss France’s company. On December 15, 2018, images of two regional misses, taken bare-chested, were broadcast to nearly eight million viewers by a camera installed without their knowledge.

Organizers apologized for the “hiccup”, but despite some reforms, the disruption adds to the controversy surrounding the much-criticised beauty pageant.

Now a hundred years old, Miss France is a symbol of “victory,” the Miss France Society asserts. “It’s a social elevator,” says its president, Alexia Laroche-Joubert, referring to misses who are “businesswomen, doctors or directors.”

The criteria have also been “modernised”, he assures. A candidate now has no age limit and can be transgender, married, a mother… and even tattooed. Only one trans candidate has come so far. She lost the Miss Paris election in 2022.

These small revolutions made Genevieve de Fonte, a historical figure, shake her famous hat in the beauty pageant. Having died in August at the age of 90, a tribute will be held Saturday evening, casting a modest veil over his stormy relationship with the current Miss organization.

MISS’S EVENING “ALWAYS A WIN”

However, this “evolution” is still far from satisfying feminists. “It’s a ‘feminist wash’: we’re in a very misogynistic election,” said Melinda Bisri of the Human Rights League in Dijon, who, along with several other associations, has called for a boycott of the ceremony. “Women abuse themselves throughout their lives to achieve these imaginary benchmarks, according to patterns that take a long time to rebuild,” she asserts.

“Miss France is still sexist in her policy of classifying women based on beauty criteria,” says Violine de Phillipis, spokeswoman for Dare to Feminism!

However, each festival counts as a huge audience on TF1 (7.1 million viewers last year).

Miss Evening “is always successful because it is primarily entertainment,” Virginie Spies, a media analyst at the University of Avignon, explains to AFP. But this success is partly due to “seeing without disdain,” which Virginie Spies defines as “seeing what we don’t necessarily appreciate in order to criticize.”

It is a “popular culture”, defended the PS mayor of Dijon François Repsamen during the municipal council on September 25, where the visit of the Misses was strongly criticized.

“The show portrays a very sexualized image of women, which appeals not only to girls and teenage viewers, but also to boys and teenage viewers,” condemned Gildin Bataille (presidential majority), municipal assistant for gender equality. )

With AFP