It comes as no surprise that Venezuela is the country with the biggest number of international beauty awards: five Miss Worlds and four Miss Universes, among dozens of other victories that no-one counts anymore. For Venezuelan women being beautiful is not only desirable; it’s rather an engagement, a duty, even a responsibility. They dress up for daily life in the manner that women in other countries dress up for a big party or as Hollywood stars do. They have developed a particular sensuality and charm, inherited from their Spanish, Indian and African roots, as well as from other cultures that have converged in Venezuela with millions of immigrants from all over the globe all along our history. They have harvested the seductiveness of women from all cultures. If gives colours and physical traits of an astounding variety as well as unexpected styles and attitudes.

That mythical beauty is put to trial everywhere in the Venezuelan social space. We elect beauty queens everywhere: so-called “god-mothers” of baseball, football and basketball teams. There are beauty queens in village holidays, harvests, companies, the Carnival. They’re everywhere: in grade schools, in high-schools, in corporations, in sports. Even in prisons they crown beautiful convicted women.

Osmel Souza plays an essential role in this phenomenon. He is the chief leader of the Miss Venezuela Organisation. He invests a singular talent and energy in leading this school of women to completely form and transform young girls with minimal conditions for their eventual metamorphosis into queens and goddesses. He moulds them in his way, body and soul. As an industrial Pygmalion, he makes them undergo a process of modification of both body and soul. He removes their most visible physical defects as much as he underlines their good features which might not be too obvious. He teaches them how to sit down, how to pick up a cup between their fingers, how to walk, how to speak with the right tone of voice and to say relevant things, to avoid gaffes, and to dress up for every occasion. Their predecessors used to be so ignorant that they had repeatedly blundered in public, like the unfortunate one who declared that she loved the music of Shakespeare. So, Souza is now very careful of their culture. They are not intellectuals, far from it, but they are not idiots either; for instance they even elected a girl who had just graduated as a medicine doctor , who is now a respected professional. Idiocy and ignorance are not accepted anymore as “natural” female traits in Venezuela.

Venezuela is a radically republican country, even more than France and the U.K., where they cut two famous kings in half. We have cut no monarch in Venezuela, but we cannot conceive the idea that there is someone born here that can be absolutely on top of everyone else because of his or her blood, to the point of being our sovereign — Charles I even claimed that there was no jurisdiction above him on the earth that could judge him. That royal paradigm makes Venezuelans laugh. Any true or counterfeit aristocrat living in Venezuela inspires every kind of jokes. A republican revolution in Venezuela would be at present a festival of drolleries. But there is an exception: the beauty queens. They are crowned, revered and called like sovereigns: the queen of students in 1928, for instance, was called “Beatriz I.” There has never been a “Beatriz II.” They are always the first, because it is not a dynasty. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas' doctrine, they are like angels: every one is a species unto herself. The central speech against the dictatorship in 1928 at the National Pantheon by Jóvito Villalba, the president of students at that time, was addressed to Beatriz I. Villalba called her “majesty.” Poets wrote incensed eulogies in her homage.

Venezuelan beauty queens are also present in politics. Irene Sáez was not the first one to mingle in politics. Beatriz I was at the centre of student protests against the merciless dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935). It was a very serious event, for that matter: after which they were sent to the most sordid gaols. After the death of the dictator these students became the dominant political power in Venezuela for the duration of their lives, and almost up to the present day — students and intellectuals in general play a major role in Latin American politics. They are called the “Generation of 1928,” and they were the forgers of the present political régime we are trying to reform. It is true that they had camouflaged their protests in the context of Carnival, in which beauty queens are considered normal. But it is significant that their rally revolved around a beauty queen and not around a clown, which is also considered normal in Carnival. They were not far from the natural Venezuelan drolleries, especially among students. It is because in Venezuela beauty queens inspire a liturgical respect. They radiate a freshness that purifies everything over which they preside. Honni soit qui mal y pense. The students in 1928 chose a beauty queen to serve them as a symbolic shield, at least during the days that it lasted.

A few years after the death of the dictator and his régime of terror, the country, already in full democracy, was host to a political confrontation between two candidates who were from antagonistic social backgrounds. One was Oly Clemente, who represented the bourgeoisie; the other one was Yolanda Leal, with very visible popular roots. Their election was the general rehearsal of the rise of popular sectors to the center stage of the political scene, in the days before municipal elections. Yolanda Leal became “Yolanda I” while Oly Clemente had to go back home defeated by the votes of the poor. The same poor who won the municipal elections mentioned above, a little while after the victory of the popular beauty. It was a nice prelude of the populism that has dominated in Venezuela.

Every Miss Venezuela undergoes a series of previous trials, at school, in her neighbourhood, in her company, in her club. Being elected Miss Venezuela is only the zenith of a succession of triumphs.

But it is not an erotic beauty. The most beautiful, Irene Sáez, is after 1962, when she was born, an untouchable figure, a stubborn maiden who has never allowed to be taken as a sex symbol. The queens rest on their asexual pedestal. If they ever marry, they lose their kingdom (or is it a “queendom”?), becoming by that, trivial everyday women, that is, plebeians. Sexual desire voids the charm of being there, immobile, like statues, vestals consecrated to angelic admiration. They are virgin Venuses, that is, a condensation of Venus with the Saint Virgin.

Irene Sáez

Of all our queens the most exact is Irene Sáez, elected Miss Universe in 1981. If you examine her consecrations, you will observe the aplomb of someone who is not uncertain about the possibility of defeat. The others, in fact, when they are crowned, show the overwhelmed emotion of one who is not in measure of conceiving in herself the transit from everyday life to her new condition of living shrine where exchange value acquires its most innocent rendering, that pedestal where every insignificance finds its death and its justification. It is perhaps that natural attitude before that elevation that led an important number of Venezuelans to want to elect her as President of the Republic, no less, perceiving her as a way of overcoming the triviality and sordidity where traditional politicians had put Venezuelan public life. Her political project floundered soon after that, but it was in spite of her condition of beauty queen. The reasons of that failure exceed the perspective of this essay. But after her defeat, she remains the fairy messiah, and she was elected governor of a state where tourism is a bourgeoning industry. Veruska Ramírez, Miss Venezuela 1997, who almost won the title of Miss Universe, even declared that she is virgin and intends to remain so until she marries. The organisers of the Miss Venezuela contest admitted that she had declared that because they had decided to give her the persona of Cinderella.

María Lionza, after a popular drawing.

It should come as no surprise. It is a perfectly conceivable idea because the only religion born in Venezuela is that of a goddess that is both beautiful and chaste: María Lionza. It is even a monotheist religion. It is our Diana, that is, a virgin that protects forests. She does not hunt like Diana because she is an environment-conscious goddess, loving biodiversity well before the present fad of ecology. Her beauty is exuberant like a tropical rain-forest. She is called “The Queen” by her believers. She has two effigies: one with her accoutrements as a queen, and one riding a danta, a tapir (tapirus terrestris), a mammal very rare even in Venezuelan forests that is ridden by no one, except by María Lionza. She is our White Goddess.

Venezuelan women are conquering more and more places in society, including those that were traditionally reserved for men. For instance, women have been a clear majority in universities for a long time. I cannot anticipate what the result will be of college professions dominated by women. Perhaps we will become a matriarchal society.

But we have already become such a society, because many homes revolve around women with no men in sight, because they are either single parents, or their men have abandoned them, or because of divorce. But for most Venezuelans, the mother is their only link with their ancestors. It is therefore a matricentric society.

Simón Bolívar

Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s fundamental hero, who led a horrifying war against Spanish domination at the beginning of the 19^th century, had his semi-official mistress: Manuelita Sáenz. She was a shrew who wore male garments, and a moustache she had torn off an enemy soldier she had killed during the final battle of the South American Independence War, Ayacucho, where she fought as a soldier. She put on her female garments in the evening, in order to seduce her lover, or her lovers, for it seems she had many. Bolívar felt that he owed her his gratitude as she had bravely saved him from an attempt on his life. He called her then “the liberator of the Liberator.” Bolívar and Manuelita were the romantic couple par excellence.

It is not a coincidence that what is unanimously considered to be the most important Venezuelan novel is centred around a dominant woman: Doña Bárbara, by Rómulo Gallegos. She embodies barbarity (Doña Bárbara means ‘Lady Barbarous’ in Spanish, where Bárbara is a name as common as Barbara is in English). She is eventually beaten by a highly cultured hero, who has just graduated from university as a lawyer. He is a sort of Parsifal that dominates Kundry by conjuring her destructive sensuality. This new Parsifal’s name is Santos Luzardo, that is, saint (Santos) and light (luz means ‘light’ in Spanish). She is beautiful like María Lionza, but hers is a venomous beauty. She is called “the devourer of men” because she seduces males in order to destroy them. It is her vengeance against the masculine world because as a teen-ager she was sold and raped. She had only one weakness: she fell in love with Santos Luzardo. It brought about her defeat, as when Zorrilla’s Don Juan fell in love with Doña Inés. If Don Juan were a woman he would be Doña Bárbara.

It is not the only instance of a strong female personality in Venezuelan fiction. In Venezuelan telenovelas (‘soap operas’), a popular narrative genre typical all over Latin America, there are frequently dominant women. I have not observed the same phenomenon in telenovelas produced elsewhere in Latin America. It seems that they are present only in Venezuelan telenovelas.

There was recently an epidemic of Lady Macbeths in Venezuela. Many politicians, especially those involved in corruption scandals, had had at one time or another, notorious mistresses who lured them into committing the worst crimes against the nation. A few years ago the president of the republic himself, allowed his semi-official and very public mistress, to abusively govern the country in his place. His co-dependence was that deep — a pathology that seems to be very common among men of his trade in Venezuela.

This adoration of women is paradoxical, like most sadomasochistic relationships. Objectively Venezuelan women are in socially disadvantaged conditions — which happens everywhere in the world; it is not a feature exclusive to Venezuela. Women are more often unemployed than men. They tend to receive smaller wages for the same job, and many are battered. This appears to be the “normal” situation of women in every country. But in Venezuela the female role is symbolically exalted to the summits of human experience. Women are elevated, they are celebrated as queens, as goddesses. Notwithstanding their objective oppression, they are rapidly enfranchising and in my immediate experience, it is only men of the middle classes and perhaps above that social level who are being dominated by strong female personalities, This domestic fervour is not a novelty.

We Venezuelan men have an ambiguous relationship with our women: we oppress them and we adore them at the same time. Voilà, perhaps there lies the secret, although perverse, of the perpetually renewed crowning of Venezuelan women in international beauty contests of the world and the universe.