Nobody else at Broadsheet can give a vlog, Tracy? Or are you just the most professional of the lot. You're starting to remind me of the go to player on a basketball team. (Did I just call you the Micheal Jordan of Feminism?)

Wait, this is suppose to be about the mine victims. I am glad that they are getting global exposer, and I am glad you presented their story on Broadsheet. That really is the only opinion I have on them. What more can we do to help them? I wish more was done to help them than just giving the most beautiful one among them a new leg.

I meant exposure, not exposer.

Commentary on this, feminism pro versus con that. Why not ask the contestants how they feel about it. I'd guess that some are happy to be considered objects of beauty after so many years of feeling they couldn't be. I however do not know. I'm not a woman and living with one leg due to a landmine. I like to be proven wrong. It means I've learned something.

This went from being food for thought to just brain junk food. Let's get more journalism and less moral commentary.

Please get a job. You have entirely too much time on your hands....err, hand.

There might be all sorts of isms unconsciously pushing Ms. Clark-Flory to push this issue, such as nationalism, racism, classism, etc., since these are non-Western, black, and poor women (unable to even afford a leg), as, once again, a well-heeled and well-coifed white woman seems to know what's best. I rue the day that missionaries felt sufficiently wise enough to travel to Africa and educate "those poor savages." However, once we shod them, we did give them meaningful work of harvesting cacao pods and rooting in the mud for our upscale chocolate truffles and our upscaler bling.

On the other hand, Ms. Clark-Flory, that was deft vlogging.

And whereas I sometimes snap at you, Ms. Clark-Flory, I do like your writing.

Yeah, it was deft vlogging, which was the only reason why I wrote a letter at all. Otherwise I would have passed over the issue without saying a word like I did the initial report on "Miss Landmine 2008". The whole story is very much like a lot of the hundreds of news stories I am subjected to everyday that make me say "gee that interesting, but very sad." What I am suppose to do, buy more diamonds and chocolate, or buy less diamonds and chocolate, send a check to One Legged African Women's fund, or just vote Democratic? I'm an American man with a full time job, and a wife and 2 children that I have to support, and I don't think anything I could do on my own would do the African landmine victims much good. It's an interesting story, I am glad the Norwegian artist is helping to get at least one of the African women a new leg, and hopefully the leaders of the world will take note of the contest and do everything they can to stop the spread of landmines. Enough said. Thank you much Tracy for bringing the "Miss Landmine 2008" beauty pageant to our attention. I hope you give us more vlogs.

If you take a very close look at these women, you find out quickly that they aren't beautiful in the usual beauty pageant sense. Some are older. Some of them are heavier. Some are mothers. All of them look a bit tired.

This doesn't mean I think them unlovely, only that it speaks to the incredible number of questions this project raises. What is beauty? Is it all just make-up, tiaras and pretty dresses? Who deserves rewards, pampered, dieted, sculpted rich kids who can recite vapid scripts, or people who have an immediate need for them? What do we make of a woman with one leg, especially who is not a conventional object of desire.

In the last discussion about this topic, someone suggested photographing them in their own clothes and in their own homes. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be women then, just pathetic, ugly victims in pathetic, ugly surroundings, invisible the second you stop looking at them. Photographers do that to the poor and disabled all the time, and it dehumanizes them. It also feeds our stereotypes about what is and isn't beautiful.

This challenges the stereotypes, shows the normally undesirable as beautiful while slamming home how much of what we see as beauty is really packaging and pandering. These women show us how ugly Miss America really is, and that's a much-needed reality check.

I'm disabled. I'd sign up for a pageant like this in a heartbeat, not because I think I'm hawt, but because I'm sick to death of the whole hawtness cult.

Since this story is at the intersection of the isms I named and others, like imperialism and militarism, it feels off-limits to me. Hell, the maiming alone makes it off-limits. There is NOTHING as intimate as wounding and recovery. If these women wanted to wave their stumps in our collective faces (and perhaps they are), they're due that.

What they're not due is being used to lever an advantage in some ongoing, hypothetical debate about the magnitude of women's worldwide suffering. It feels to me like Ms. Clark-Flory absconds their suffering to inflate hers. What these women endured and endure is beyond my ken, Ms. Clark-Flory's ken, and the ken of our kin. That any of us would dare feel good about a single fookin' plastic leg (when the real one was likely lost to an American-made mine), while the rest of the contestants hop and hobble should be reason enough for decent people to literally gnash their teeth and weep.

Ms. Clark-Flory, rather than opine about the meaning of this contest, find a way for us to send these women some money, so that more than one contestant will once again have two legs under her. You and Salon have used these women to generate some copy. Not let them use your platform to raise some money.