While Miss China took the Miss World 2012 title, cows in Shanxi Province also had the opportunity to be crowned the winner in the Miss Dairy Cow Pageant, from The New York Daily News:
Cows in China got the chance to strut their stuff Saturday at the “Miss Dairy Cow Pageant” in the city of Shuozhou in Shanxi Province.
The competition, complete with models clad in teenie-weenie bikinis, featured 200 dairy ‘dames’ from 11 different farms, according to Want China Times.
The cows were judged based on their milk quality, appearance and pedigree.
The bovine beauty found worthy of first place took home not only the honor but also 50,000 yuan – approximately $7,900.
Aside from the cows, the models that appeared alongside the competitors have stirred up some controversy. The Wall Street Journal reports:
For years China has been known for its generous deployment of bikini models to spice up industry conferences and meetings. But news that scantily clad models were recently recruited to enliven the country’s first “dairy cow beauty pageant” is being described some as utterly — or should that be udderly? — ridiculous.
Photos of the girls — all of them, perhaps understandably, wearing masks — spread around traditional and social media websites on Monday, and even earned an editorialon the website of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily.
While noting that the popularity of beauty contests has been rising (China’s Yu Wenxiawon the Miss World pageant over the weekend), the editorial argues that in this case things seem to have gone a bit too far. “Beautiful girls have far greater ability to attract attention that the milk cow contestants,” it reads. “How do you think that makes the cows feel?”
On Sina Corp.’s popular Weibo microblogging service, most users milked the ample potential to make puns about the contest, but a few were more critical of the proceedings. “Shanxi’s ‘cow models” — an inconceivable objectification of women,”wrote one user posting under the screen name Ariel_Meow.
