Despite the good intentions, this can achieve the opposite result; it grates unnervingly on the feminist values of many women I know.

That I am not a fan of beauty pageants is a sentiment I attribute to both my politically correct Canadian upbringing and the particular brand of feminism I subscribe to.

But, although I oppose everything these contests stand for, I begrudgingly accept their existence on the basis that feminism is supposed to be about increasing women's options, not limiting them.

The greatest challenge to my stance on beauty contests came two years ago, when I was told by my television producer to write a voice-over about the Miss USA pageant. Two of my male colleagues had turned down the assignment on the basis that pageants were degrading to women. I objected on the same ground.

But I was a junior employee, and that assignment proved to be the first in a series of initiations into the 'real' world.

So I compromised; I took on the assignment as a challenge and wrote the piece, admittedly in a more negative and subjective fashion than any newscast should put to air.

I kept the intro tight and cut a measly 15 seconds of pictures (the standard was 30), excluding all the visuals of women strutting proudly in their bathing suits.

Close-ups of various beauty queen perma-smiles and the symbolic glittering tiara were all the audience saw. Bodies were excluded.

I did not mind so much that these women were proud of their bodies, but I objected to their parading around such seemingly misplaced values.

Beauty is not achieved by hard work, brains or talent: it's granted through genetic luck.

I remember being taken aback by the assignment because I had naively assumed that most people I knew would be as opposed to pageants as I.

Not for the first time in Hong Kong, I was caught off guard. It was disheartening to discover that some women and men I knew still believed being in a beauty pageant was a goal young women should aspire to achieving.

Such suggestions were never made to me in Canada. This may have had to do with the fact that my family lived across from the American border and watched American television, and the Miss USA pageants shown hardly ever - if at all - displayed Asian faces.

The only public Asian female figure, in fact, was Connie Chung, a prominent American news anchor.

She was the only person young North American Asian women could possibly choose to emulate, simply because she was the only Asian face we saw.

Who knows? Had more Asian women been in beauty pageants, maybe we would have found them the basis for comparison.

But my bone of contention with beauty pageants is limited neither to the misplaced emphasis on 'vital' statistics nor to the absurd trivia questions that supposedly prove these women are intelligent.

Quite simply, beauty contests offend my notion of what beauty is, and how it should be recognised.

When I caught a segment of the Miss Hong Kong pageant a few weeks ago, it struck me as odd that these potential beauty queens looked so alike.

It was as though they were clones of their successors, their commonalities made more plain than their differences.

Beauty is often embodied in that which is common yet unfathomably rare.

If the point was to celebrate beauty, I think pageants have failed. These contests only confirm, in the most superficial sense, that a woman has a sense of poise and the semblance of good looks.

But what type of women need this confirmation? Do such women ever consider, that by striving for years to attain the status of beauty icon, they have proved only that they are less beautiful than those who never bother?