Breast beauty contest degrades campus culture

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A CAMPUS beauty pageant in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, is in the spotlight for requiring contestants to have perfectly proportioned bodies, including breasts with nipples more than 20 centimeters apart.

Beauty contests are common among Chinese universities and play a major part in campus culture in an age when male students dare to comment in public on beautiful girls and vote for their dream campus queen.

A nationally broadcast campus queen competition used to require ladies to display their symmetrical figures, excellent talents and quick wits. However, the Hubei contest reduces beauty to measurements, which lowers the class of the event and degrades the school atmosphere.

At any rate, we do not encourage universities to launch these competitions because educational institutions are supposed to be the nation's "pure realm" of uncontaminated intellectual and spiritual life.

Competitions promote the unhealthy notion that study is useless, which distorts social values and misleads students into obsession with physical beauty.

Meanwhile, the profit-seeking organizers create vulgar hype that grabs attention but does social damage.

Universities are a refuge for literature, culture and science and play a vital role in nurturing young people. We need to avoid "breast beauty selection" as we improve campus culture.

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