Released On 06 July 2026
Anushka's blog: “Sweet Dream or Beautiful Nightmare?’
Beauty myths, pageants, and patriarchy: how romance fantasy masks control.
Beyoncé said it best.
‘He cradled her neck in his hands and looked at her like he’d never let her go. His eyes turned cold and narrowed..’
This was my winning competition entry for a horror story in a tweet. When thinking about the most terrifying thing I could imagine, it was one of those classic tales of a young girl running away from an axe-wielding predator in the woods, finally finding refuge in a house, bolting the door shut and that chilling moment when she turns around to see her captor already inside the house staring at her with a menacing expression.
I thought of how we are at our most vulnerable when in love, where we put our trust, finances and therefore freedom in the hands of another.
Yet, from the time we are children, girls are fed this interlinked fantasy of beauty and romance. We are culturally taught to worship beauty via fairy tales, through advertising, TV/films and even the news. How often is a dry economic or political front page news story embellished with a picture of Dua Lipa to draw our attention?
As a child in the 80s, I was fed this aspirational notion of beauty. I remember watching the Miss World Beauty Pageant whilst eating McDonalds as Friday night family entertainment with my parents and brother. My Dad commented that the best-looking women were always the South American, Mediterranean or North Indian women, because they were ‘not too light and not too dark’. As a South Asian darker skinned person, I accepted my lot that I fell short of this beauty standard as a natural conclusion. I still remember these poor beauty pageant girls with their forced beatific smiles. Some were visibly trembling, one would always be actually crying uncontrollably and the others defiantly holding back the tears as they stood vulnerably in their swimwear awaiting some smarmy old man to judge and cast his vote. Even as a child, I perceived this as utterly degrading, yet it was completely normalised.
I didn’t then understand how women competing to be the most beautiful according to standards set by men was a means of patriarchal control and brainwashing. If a woman believes that her value is linked to her ability to win a husband and bear children, the control and subjugation is compounded.
I remember how my late grandfather often quoted his favourite line from Keats’ Endymion, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’. A keen boxer, he had fought his brother to win the affection of my grandmother, a Sri-Lankan beauty queen, who he equally proceeded to beat later on in life.
One of my favourite quotes is from the French author Stendhal: ‘La beauté n’est que la promesse de bonheur’. ‘Beauty is only the promise of happiness’ and in a world obsessed with beauty, I remind myself of this as often as I can.
As Beyoncé and Shakira warned, do not get caught by a ‘Beautiful Liar’.
Anushka is a full time lawyer, parent of two teenagers and running and writing hobbyist.
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