Never mind the Middle East crisis. America has other important matters to discuss, like... the Rosie and Trump fued! As the crucifixion of Rosie O' Donnell heats up across America, I cast my mind back to another of Trump's beauty queens who was a little closer to my heart than I would have liked. Let's take a look at the women who aim to please, and the men who sell them.

 

Every year, the city of Newcastle holds a festival celebrating itself; an appropriately lackluster affair that wreaks of small-town community, and secretly covers small-town corporate corruption (behind every government funding of "community" projects in this town, you will find a profiteering business). At the end of this festival, there is a parade through the main streets, luring onlookers to walk alongside what are mostly advertisements on wheels to the local park, where there, you'll find a fair featuring rides, stores and food outlets all owned by the same company (which sets up a deal to not only be government-funded for their "community" event, but to have no other company allowed in for the event - for at the heart of any modern festival is consuming - other than their own). This parade starts, quite literally, outside my window, and it's lucky my morbid curiosity longed to witness this consumer sham of a spectacle, because I wouldn't have been able to ignore it, anyway. I woke to the sounds of the local marching band, the Novacastrian symbol of yesteryear that is The Marching Koalas (let's just ignore the plague of child-molestation sex scandals that eventually poisoned the phenomenon) bringing the marching band sound so thrillingly into contemporary times with a brass rendition of Michael Jackson's "Black Or White". This, I wanted to see. I dressed myself in my Newcastle camouflage (board shorts, thongs and a baggy shirt in conspicuous - masculine - colours), and went outside.

 

And there, I found the streets littered with beaming parents, kodaks flashing away, who had come to witness their little girl's moment of joy. There were many young boys in the parade; but these were all musicians or budding street performers - the kind of boy who will spend his school-life in Newcastle being rejected and beaten for being a "nerd" or a "fag". No, it was the little girls - scores of them - who were the jewel of this parade, and no other group reached the apex of this small-town fame for Newcastle's women quite like the cheerleading squad for the local "pride of the valley" (as the train station here welcomes every visitor against a backdrop of the team logo, and a medieval knight charging into brutal battle), The Newcastle Knights.

They start them young, when it comes to this particular institution. The boys are given footballs before most of them can even walk, and the girls are given pom-poms and beauty tips. One day, these little girls may experience the pride and joy that is titilating drunk local men who are waiting for their footy to start; but before-hand, they are trained as part of the mini-Knights cheerleading squad, who march down the streets of Newcastle every October, cameras flashing madly, the hearts of blushing fathers skipping a beat. The joys of parenthood; alas, I may never know them.

The uniform for these youngsters had remained the same for over a decade: knee-high black leather boots, thick nylon fishnets, an almost string bikini bottom, and a tight lycra boob tube with a plunging neckline. Their hair - mostly blonde - would be tied back, and the soft skin of these young girls would spend hours trying desperately to breathe beneath the foundation, eye shadow, lipstick and rouge. "They look like little whores", I gasped. But I did not mean it as the ordinary conceptual insult that the term has become, today; I meant, quite seriously, that these girls were clearly fashioned off a culture of prostitution. The only place I'd ever seen boots like those were in the local sex shop. I lived in Kings Cross for many years, and then in the red-light district of Newcastle, where I saw countless ordinary suburban men come and go from their hidden pleasures, and befriended many of the street-girls and brothel workers who wandered my streets. For a short time, I counselled them, and it was through these years that I recognised that this phenomenon, so central to this society and utterly impossible to eradicate, was not an isolated social problem, but a symptom - a symbol, even - of this society, at large. The most unfortunate thing about The Divinci Code scandal (a phenomenon I despised) was that it trivialised a most valid observation of our society, and by housing it in trite fiction, dismantled the academic thought it had blatantly exploited, by holding it up to be so easily shot down. Women are whores in this society of men. They always have been; and so long as this society remains the cruel patriarchal world that it is, they will remain so. These little Novactastrian girls were little whores, and they made their daddy's ever so proud.

"How old are you?" a gushing onlooker asked one of the little whores, as they gathered outside my building, waiting for their proud march to begin.

 

She held up her hands, extending eight fingers. "I'm 8! Aren't I, Daddy?" she said, turning to the man who would be her protector in life, and her portrait of what men "are".

"That's right!" confirmed Daddy, before turning back to the passer-by to sigh, and beam with a pride so great, it seemed to have taken his capacity for speech away.

"You're Daddy must be proud of you!" the local beamed.

Oh, he was. Make no mistake of that.

I remember this culture well, from my own adolescence just near here - it was always the whores that the boys prized most as Blue Light Disco conquests - and so I would never suggest that this phenomenon is "new" (as noted, it's as old as The New Testament). But there has been a notable revival in this community of the value in the role of the whore to the young women of this area. Two years ago, a local girl did the unthinkable and claimed title to the entire world. Her name was Jennifer Hawkins, and she was, for a short time (though in the hearts of Novacastrians, she will keep her crown, forever), Miss Universe. She strutted a stage in her bathers, changed outfits a few times, starved herself (the next winner of Miss Universe would, a few hours after her triumph and undernourished by her pre-comp diet, collapse from the tightness of her dress), and giggled out those couple of lines that are used as an excuse to suggest these women are valued for their social awareness (when, in fact, they merely condescend in their shallowness and idealism - usually something "cute", along the lines of, "I wish the whole world could live in peace"), and then, she owned the world (although, in reality, for twelve months, a handful of rich men owned her). She would go on to perform as a spokeswoman at a bunch of charities I bet you couldn't name me a single one of, and instead became forever blazened on our memory as the lovable beauty queen who lost her pants on a Westfield runway. Newcastle had another "pride of the valley", and where did this particular pride start out? As a Newcastle Knights cheerleader. The world, too, could be yours, little whores of the Knights. Start dreaming.

They've been dreaming, ever since.

I still remember the day Jennifer Hawkins was crowned Miss Universe - a contestant that Donald Trump, the head of the pageant, called, "The best Miss Universe we've ever had" - and Newcastle, essentially a depressed town struggling to get over that earthquake, the closing of BHP, and the fact we are basically the favorite exploit for state government, went into a frenzy. "She's our girl!" cried the local paper. Newcastle is so insecure, so desperate, that it's ecstatic assurances that "we knew all along" - that tend to be the basis of the town's talk whenever someone "makes it" (an infrequent event, it must be said) - always seem so transparently delusional. Newcastle, truth be told, is a town with such little sense of self, it seems no bigger a surprise to anyone more than to Newcastle, itself.  The over-reaction of a Novacastrian succeeding in the outside world completely gives them away - not only for their secret longing to be validated (behind a deceptive cultural facade of a resentment of the outside world), but the part of them that truly believes they are worthless. The "We showed 'em!" aspect is impossible to miss. These local celebrities become a beacon of hope to a sorry city left to remember the greatness (a selective memory, perhaps, as it is) of a past that seems further and further away, with each passing year. "I come from Newcastle," the beauty queen once said, "And Newcastle is in Australia". But for Novacastrians, a larger, nationalistic pride had nothing to do with the crowning of Jennifer Hawkins. She's a Newie girl. And they told her she wouldn't get anywhere (in true Newcastle style, she admitted she never aspired to), but they put her on a plane, and she stood there in her little outfits, and she smiled, and said the answers to the silly questions she'd rehearsed with her male trainers, and they decided she was the hottest chick in the world!

This had repercussions for all of Newcastle, but that hope was always put in the context of gender. Newie boys had made it for a long time (Daniel Johns, who would be a hero until he suddenly started dressing "like a fag" - thank heavens he married that chick, and paraded her around Darby Street; The Screaming Jets, who I was often reminded by locals had been chosen - as if by the very hand of God - to perform the theme song for The Footy Show; and lest we forget the hero of all heroes, the irrepressible - and violent, and misogynistic, and drugfucked - king of the Newcastle Knights, Johnsie); but now, a Newie chick had made it. Newie chicks are the hottest chicks in the world. Who are you to say they have no future?!

 

In the symbol of the beauty queen - the woman the rich men of this world crowned the most sexually pleasing (bring up the constant PR assurances of "smart" women with me, when someone with cellulite and bad teeth wins the thing) - there was a hope for the young women of this town. On the now infamous episode of The View, one of the other women at the table would respond to Rosie by suggesting that the beauty queen phenomenon was a good thing because it offered a way for women in lower social classes to move up in the world. I don't doubt for a second that this is the case, because I have experienced it, first hand. But that's not what's so wonderful about it. It's what's so horrible. There's actually a hope - a pride - connected to the valuing of women in such a way; and women in these places see it as a way "out". That's what they have to aspire to. That's horrible.

 

When I went out into the Newie streets, that day, I found the local Lebanese shopkeeper almost beside herself.

"Hurrah, Jennifer!" she beamed, fists punching the air, as I arrived for the daily paper and milk.

Her young daughter, 12, danced around the store in her little lycra outfit, her bleached hair hiding her ethnicity the best she could, shaking fresh red and blue pom-poms that had been lovingly created to commemorate the day's event. But the event was not just the victory of Jennifer Hawkins. It was a day of hope for her daughter's future - as bizarre as that may sound to you.

"Miss Hawkins was a Knights cheerleader!" she grinned at me. "Just like my little Anna!"

"Jennifer! Jennifer!" little Anna cheered, as she pranced around the shop, without realising there were two middle-aged men hiding conspicuously in the isle behind her, holding cereal boxes in a pose to suggest they were reading the package, and not catching glimpses of Anna that put guilty smirks across their faces.

"Who do you want to be when you grow up?" asked little Anna's Mother.

"Jennifer!" she screamed, as she star jumped into the air.

Her Mother laughed, and turned to me with a look that would have filled me with tenderness if it was not for the context. Instead, it broke my heart.

"My Daddy says I'm prettier than Jennifer!" little Anna announced, with that somewhat unpleasant arrogance little girls often pump themselves up with when their fathers sexually praise them. Little whores learn very quickly that Daddy's love - representing men til the very day most of them die - comes in no greater form than the valuing of the aesthetic. In the boys' town of Newcastle, there is no greater value for women.

Two years later, I looked for little Anna in the parade. She was nowhere to be seen. I suppose dreams die hard; but admittedly, such dreams die a little harder for girls in this town who are Lebanese (many of the Lebanese shopkeepers found less delight in this most racist of towns, after the Cronulla riots).

 

I took my place on the pavement, that day, and waited for the parade. The Marching Koalas strode down the road, trumpets held high towards the harsh summer sun, and behind me I heard a woman remark; "You know what happened to the man who use to run them, don't you? He was molesting them. Even the principal knew, but they covered it up for years. He killed himself, in the end."

"Poor little angels," her companion sighed.

And then, there they were - the young budding Jennifers; the crowd erupting, an occasional deep male voice separating itself from the noise - "Woh! Yeah!"

"And here they come!" announced the parade MC over the speakers. "And don't they look wonderful?! These little lovelies may one day be cheering the boys on at a home game! Or even being a proud ambassador of Newcastle to the people of the world, like our very own Jennifer Hawkins!"

"That's my girl," a short, fat man with a tight "Triumph" shirt and a mullet muttered, beside me.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" his friend affirmed. "She's nothing like her sister."

"Oh, I always say that her sister couldn't turn the head of a pitbull!" laughed the man - her very own father.

His friend - a woman (for the ultimate tragedy of this town is that the women are raised to adapt to this culture and therefore accept it, themselves) - laughed, and hit him, playfully; "Oh, you're terrible!"

He joined in her laughter for a moment, before focusing his eyes on his little cheerleader once more, leading him to sigh, overwhelmed with pride and hope. "Na, she makes me proud, this little one," he finally said, poignantly. "We'll see her at a game one day, I just know it."