A very serious civil rights struggle — the stuff that Martin Luther King surely envisioned — engulfs Brazil, home of the Miss Bumbum contest.
“I always dreamed of taking part in Miss Bumbum, but I never thought it would be possible,” Paula Oliveira, a transsexual contestant, tells the UK’s Sun, a newspaper whose page-three bias against that part of the female body raises questions about its ulterior (anterior?) motives here.
Ellen Santana, significantly a biology student when not partaking in the anatomy competition, ranks as one of those benighted curmudgeons who wants to kill Oliveira’s dream. “The competition is supposed to be 100 per cent feminine and yet we’re going to have bottoms which are men’s bottoms,” she explains. “It doesn’t matter if they’ve had surgery, changed their names or sex on a piece of paper.”
Many male enthusiasts of the event seem similarly unenthusiastic (bumbum bigots, they!) about the transgenders putting the “xy” in sexy. The organizers, holding more progressive views on the views they spotlight, allowed Oliveira and one other transgender to compete in the contest featuring 27 participants. “I’m not offended by what they said, because it’s clear they want me out because I’ve got a much sexier ass,” Oliveira insists. “They are feeling threatened because they are seeing a trans who is more beautiful than them.”
The controversy comes as not the first to surround the pageant picking the top bottom. Five Miss Bumbum 2017 contestants donned “beef-kinis” to protest sexual harassment. And in 2016, a re-enactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” among aspirants to the title divided Brazilians devoted to the two most popular national religions, Roman Catholicism and the Church of Bumbum.
