Will the real Mr. Switzerland please stand up
It’s official, there’s a new Mr. Switzerland (and much to my surprise, it’s not this guy). I learned this from watching the local news yesterday. It was the second story, following close on the heels of a very important piece about Paris Hilton’s first trip to Basel (or Zurich, or somewhere… how am I supposed to know where she was when even she didn’t? Look, the important thing is that it was definitely Switzerland, and thus worthy of the lead story on the Swiss TV news).
Anyway, back to Mr. Switzerland. I’m sure other countries have ‘mister competitions’, but I have never been aware of them the way I am here. Last year’s Mr. Switzerland has been prominently featured in ads (for underwear and barbecue supplies) plastered all over the city ever since we moved here. There was a poll conducted by the local commuter paper last week to determine everyone’s favorite candidate for this year’s competition (the shocking outcome revealed that people in this part of Switzerland favored a guy who didn’t even speak German). The Swiss seem to take this whole male beauty pageant thing quite seriously.
That’s the thing that strikes me as so strange: men in a beauty pageant, especially in not-so-progressive-when-it-comes-to-gender-roles Switzerland (not that I’m so sure male beauty pageants would count as progressive, anyway). The news showed a clip of the end of the pageant when the winner was announced. There was no immediate hug from the runner up, no crown and sash, and no running mascara from his tears of joy. The losers eventually hoisted the winner up on to their shoulders, in a manly display that seemed like it belonged at a soccer game instead of a beauty pageant. It definitely made me wish I had seen the whole thing. Next year…
Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I was watching the Swiss news at all, it’s because I desperately needed to know how long it took for the Böögg’s head to explode (12 minutes and 9 seconds, in case you were also wondering). I didn’t actually attend Sechselauten yesterday, but I have a strong suspicion it went down a lot like last year’s Sechseläuten (and not entirely different from 1948′s Sechseläuten, for that matter).
