You know....just because one thing is being addressed doesn't mean that all other things don't matter.

Just because their beauty is being celebrated doesn't mean their other needs are not important.

Problem is..

I loathe beauty contests in general..so all give me the creeps. I cant really separate out that feeling from the atypical physicality of the contestants. It isn't creepy because they are missing body parts.....its creepy because all beauty pageants are inherently icky.

Tell ya what, TCF, why don't you write out a list for these people of all the ways they should be spending their money in so that it would meet YOUR approval.

In the meantime, apart from the two minutes it took you to write about this,

JUST WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HELP?

To blame all of this 100% on America.

We're assuming that "being beautiful" is unimportant to these people's lives. Before making that assumption, I'd want to know a few things:

a) How are people with missing limbs discriminated against in Angola?

b) Do missing limbs impair these women's prospects of finding a life partner?

c) Do missing limbs impair these women's prospects of finding employment?

Sometimes "being beautiful" is synonymous with "being socially acceptable." The artist who came up with this idea frames it as fighting the "freak show" concept -- and when I looked at the website, what struck me was how the pictures showed women with a lot of strength, and who felt good about themselves.

I'm OK with that.

Well, considering that the prize was a prosthetic leg, I doubt that the "do-gooders" in question really do think that the "biggest crisis" in the women's lives is that they don't feel beautiful. I think they realize that missing a leg is a bigger crisis.

My question is two-fold; first of all, what is Angola doing about this issue? Are these women being helped by their own country in any way? Yes, one can grouse about the white people coming to Angola and doing this or that - but what are the local black people doing?

But second of all; why, oh why, do all the "do-gooders" in the world choose Africa as their place to do good? It's clear from the blogs cited in that posting that their efforts are not welcome and not appreciated. Surely there are disabled people in Norway whom he could help? Or are those people not as interesting as the African landmine victims?

Well, it accomplished what it set out to do, brilliantly, at least as far as I'm concerned. I would not have devoted one second to thinking about Angola today if I hadn't seen this website. Now, I knew vaguely that conditions in Angola were "war torn" and that most people were poor and that I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there, but I couldn't have translated that into specifics.

All of the young women were paid for their photoshoots - 200 dollars US - the only paid work many of them have had in a long time. And they got to keep all the clothes, jewelry, and so forth, from the photoshoots. You might have wanted to know that before making comments about American Apparel being "well outside of their reach."

Who'd a thunk it?

I think it's pretty neat. It looked to me like folks were having fun, and that's enough of a return on a beauty pageant, as far as I can tell.

How fascinating and strange. What a peculiar piece of culture to collide. Land mines and beauty pageants.

I'm not much for them either, but I can remember vividly the contest held during the siege of Sarajevo where the contestants held up a banner at the end that read "PLEASE DON'T LET THEM KILL US". I'm not dead certain but I think the footage may have made it into one of Bono's or U2's videos. At the time it struck me as almost surreal and I don't think I'll ever forget it. It just captured the terrible plight of what were obviously decent people trying to get the world's attention with whatever civilized means they had left at that point. Dignity usually is never the first thing that comes to my mind when the subject matter revolves around beauty contests, but I do think there can be cases where the susbstance can be more than "skin-deep" as they say.

A prosthetic leg only for the winner of the pageant?

How shabby.

Why not: save the money on the stupid gowns and glitz and give all the women prosthetic legs. Then photograph them all in heir own clothes, in their own homes, and say "These women are beautiful."

I like this one. The women aren't teenaged dolls, they're grown women with husbands, boyfriends, children, jobs and lives. They work hard and dream big. They're also disabled, wearing at least one of their wounds on the outside. I like this beauty. I can relate to this beauty.

I'm a disabled woman myself, and I don't begrudge these women any of the attention they're getting. Sure, it would be great if Oprah or someone would help draw enough attention to my own disease so that some kind of real treatment could be found, but you know what? I hate land mines. They suck, partly because they can keep on sucking long after the war is over. Personally, I think drawing attention to the damage they do is a good thing, and this is a particularly dramatic way of doing it.

As a species, we tend to think of the disabled as ugly merely by definition. I'm not blind. I can see the difference in how people look at me when I use my walker and how they look at me when I don't. Evidence of my disability trumps everything else about me.

So I think this is great, treating those who are ugly by definition as if they were beautiful: making them up, putting them in expensive gowns and jewelry, photographing them as if they were fashion models. It tells us a lot about what we think beauty is, and how completely disconnected from real life our usual icons are.

So my best wishes to the contestants. I hope their efforts do some good, both for themselves and for their communities.