Blog
Lama Hajj

Here’s Why Everyone Was So Horrible To Miss Lebanon 2016

This is my opinion, at least.

After Sandy Tabet was voted in as Miss Lebanon 2016, a shitstorm of tweets, memes, and comments critiquing and disparaging her looks shortly followed. These comments were so horrifying, I couldn’t help but wonder how she handled reading them.





I understand that when you’re signing up for a beauty contest, you’re essentially asking to be measured and to be assigned a number – I completely get that. But there is a difference between getting judged in a formal setting and being torn to shreds by half the country. Ask yourself, would you walk up to Sandy and say any of the hateful shit that was written to her online?

Here is a perfectly beautiful woman – and please don’t kid yourself because she is beautiful – being bashed on social media, why? The short answer is that when we see a woman, we have an almost automatic response to denigrate her. But there’s a bigger culprit here.





My theory is that we’re all frustrated, and little Sandy bore the brunt of it.

There is toxic trash on every street, our politicians are cooking up yet another fuck-fest that is sure to make them a whole lot richer and the country a whole lot poorer, and we can’t do a single thing about it.

In Poland, women are protesting for their right to fair reproductive laws, in Greece pensioners are protesting for better state incomes, and in Lebanon? Radio silence. We’re pent up, frustrated, upset – so we unleashed fury on this woman from a safe distance.

The truth is, we’ve lost sight of the most important thing of all: the fact that beauty pageants are ridiculous, misogynistic, and archaic. Please don’t throw your “it’s for scholarships and charity” shit at me, the cornerstone of pageants is the measurement of someones looks. But still, we need to admit that Sandy did not deserve that.

This is like when Olympic athletes stumble and you get assholes who have never gotten off their couch weigh in like sports experts. I don’t really have any great advice for people who feel compelled to harshly dissect someones looks other than to say don’t do it. It’s horrifying and says more about you than it does about anyone else.

Quite frankly, you should be ashamed of yourself for even watching a show this stupid. As penance, you must now go adopt five puppies.