This Saturday, throngs of women will parade across a stage in Ontario, all tan skin and sun-bleached hair. However, setting the annual "Miss Reef Wakestock'' apart from Hawaiian Tropics, Hooters and other like-minded beauty pageants: Contestants' breasts will be completely covered up, hidden beneath a protective rash guard (think midriff-baring tee made of water-resistant material). Boobs are besides the point here at this wakeboarding festival. The chant of this surf-crazy crowd: ''Let me see your thong!''
Apparently, wet tee-shirt contests are so last decade. Now, in an age where J. Lo has inspired curvier mannequins, where rapper Nelly has created a line of jeans called Apple Bottoms ("to highlight and accentuate the curves of a woman") and bootylicious is part of the everyday lexicon, the ass is where it's at. And it's women's rear ends that are being judged in "Miss Reef Wakestock" (prize: title plus $500).
Promoters say the contest, which consistently draws large crowds, promotes the healthy, toned body of a real surfer - smaller chest, firm thighs and fantastic tush. "It's not a typical bikini contest," Shereef Shiaty of Reef Promotional Staffing Inc., which provides the contestants for Miss Reef Wakestock, told the Toronto Star. "Girls who surf a lot definitely do not have a big chest and cleavage but tight, fit bodies and a nice bum. It's not your fake breast Barbie doll look or beer company stuff." Their bottom line, supposedly, is the bottom line.
And yet, Miss Reef Wakestock 2006 was a Bud Light model.
So, as women gear up to bare their booties (perhaps preparing with a butt facial - Google it), is this something we are supposed to see as progress? An evolution in bikini contests where contestant's asses, not breasts, are judged, as one Canadian journalist posed? Is it better that an actual muscle, the gluteus maximus, something that can be developed and strengthened through sport, is being put on display, versus women's breasts, so oversexualized and lionized in our society to the point where girls receive implants for high school graduation?
Or is this just another way to objectify women by breaking us down into body parts to be gawked at? Is the rear end not equally fetishized in our society, since long before Sir Mix-A-Lot proclaimed his love of big butts in 1992 (nabbing him a Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo, natch). In 2001, Cosmopolitan Magazine deemed 'butt cleavage...definitely in" and now more than a handful of women are undergoing butt implants or Brazilian Butt Lifts, a type of butt augmentation procedure in which fat is removed from one are of the body and reinjected into the buttocks.
"...not a typical bikini contest," Mr. Shiaty?
My ass.