I was proud to be among a new generation of feminists reviving the spirit of a notorious 1970 protest outside the Miss World Contest in London on Sunday. Wearing purple sashes emblazoned with titles like 'MissOgynist' and 'MissRepresented', around two hundred activists chanted "We're not beautiful, we're not ugly, we're angry!" and "being a woman is not a competition!"
The Miss World contest was returning to London to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the event, which was first held in London in 1951. It is important to remember that the origins of the competition lie in an era that preceded the Sex Discrimination Act, when many areas of professional and public life were closed to women, and before the concept of 'sexual harassment' had even been established, let alone recognised and legislated against.
These roots in an era of socially-sanctioned inequality were not lost on the protestors, who conveyed a very clear message that the Miss World contest has no place in London in the 21st- century.
The contest is, of course, no stranger to feminist protest. The 1970 Miss World finals were spectacularly disrupted, when - at the moment that host Bob Hope asked the bikini-clad contestants to turn around in order for the judges to get a 360-degree view of them - feminists threw smoke bombs, stink bombs and flour bombs, causing chaos and bringing proceedings to a temporary halt. The action was witnessed by millions, and is widely credited with mobilising a generation of women to join the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain.
It was both moving and inspiring to see several of these original protesters joining younger activists from the London Feminist Network1, Million Women Rise2, OBJECT3 and UK Feminista4 in demonstrating against the return of the contest to London.
The support and solidarity evident across the generations gave the lie to the hackneyed notion that young women are no longer interested in feminism, or that they believe they have nothing to learn from second wave feminists. Women of all ages united to protest an institution which they see as inherently sexist in its celebration of the objectification of women and focus on women's physical appearance. Activists sang together, chanted together and laughed together, holding placards bearing slogans such as "women - not objects" and "sexism is pretty ugly."
In many ways, this younger generation of activists is battling against a culture that is even more relentless in its objectification of women than that of their 1970s fore-sisters. To highlight this, the protest re-instated the "freedom trash can", which had been a feature of the 1968 Miss World protest in the US.
Whilst second wave feminists had thrown items such as eyelash curlers and girdles into the original rubbish bin, this time bin-bound objects included 'lads' mags' and fake scalpels, to symbolise the increasing presence of pornography within mainstream culture, and the normalisation of cosmetic surgery. Protesters drew attention to the fact that, in spite of the recession, the beauty industry is booming, with almost 9,500 women undergoing breast augmentations last year in the UK5 and new procedures such as labiaplasties seeing a five-fold increase in the past decade.
It might be argued that these new forms of objectification pose a considerably more significant threat to women's equality than the contest itself, which many regard as being a relic of a bygone era.
But of course, the two are deeply connected, and the 'retro-sexism' marked by the event's return to London is part of a worrying trend: only a few months earlier, feminists were also protesting the re-opening of the Playboy Club, a similarly sexist cultural institution making a return having fallen out of favour in recent decades.
These cultural trends must be seen in the light of other current threats to women's equality. As we know, the spending cuts imposed by the coalition government will have a disproportionate effect on women, and there are also worrying signs of attempts to roll back equalities legislation.
As the women singing and chanting outside Earls Court are only too aware, at a time when women's equality is under such threat, any kind of nostalgia for the 'glamour' of a pre-feminist era is deeply misplaced.
The protest took place on Sunday, 6 November from 2.30-5pm outside Earls Court Conference and Exhibition Centre (EC&O Venues), Warwick Road, London SW5 9TA