I have a knee-jerk reaction to beauty pageants. Even the words “beauty pageants” bring me out in hives. The idea of young women parading about in swimming costumes or “evening gowns” and then being marked - usually by considerably older men - on their appearance seems to me simply Not Right. I have nothing against young women being pleased that they might be pretty; I just don’t think they should be awarded points for it. Objectification aside, I’d rather be invited to celebrate young women's achievements than the pertness of their breasts.

Then I read last week about Rachel Christie and wondered whether the above view wasn’t actually a bit of an old chestnut. Beauty pageants may be anachronistic, but our view of them is perhaps not trenchantly modern either. After all, we live in an age where, regrettably, 16-year-old girls find it amusing to make porno movies of themselves on their mobile phones. By comparison, gliding along in your evening frock in stately fashion with a number on your wrist seems utterly harmless. In our all-must-have-prizes culture, perhaps there isn’t anything terribly the matter with giving prizes to the prettiest, as well as the brainiest.

Rachel Christie is 20 and was last week crowned Miss England. She’s black - the first black winner - and she is also an accomplished athlete who specialises in the heptathlon. She is Linford Christie’s niece. She lives with her mother, two brothers and one sister in a council flat in west London. Her father, Russell, died when she was eight. He was stabbed to death after becoming involved in a drugs war. Rachel got into athletics when she was 11, but then fell in with “the wrong people”. Eventually, though, she realised she did not want “a future on benefits” and now trains six days a week, showing particular prowess at the 400 metres. Her involvement with beauty queendom came partly as a result of trying to fund her athletics training - she’s hoping for glory in 2012 .

“I thought that it would give me an entry into legitimate modelling and that would help me fund my training,” she said last week. “We struggled for years, we had no holidays, no car – the day we children got something we wanted was a rare one. So I know I have to work hard. When you begin with very little, maybe you have to aim high.”

It’s all a far cry from cuddling kittens and world peace. Speaking, in tears, after she won Miss England, Rachel said: “It really does mean so much to me. One of my reasons for doing Miss England in the first place was because I wanted to show people, the younger generation especially, that you can do something positive with your life. Whoever you are, you can be who you want and whatever you want to be if you just put your mind to it and have ambition and determination.” She said her father’s death had “made me think about what’s important in life”.

I’m trying to apply the usual “beauty pageants are bad” rules to Rachel Christie, but I keep failing. I don’t feel sorry for her and I don’t think she has humiliated herself. I just think: good on her. Perhaps it’s partly to do with the fact that she has an athlete’s body, which is more comfortable to look at than a semi-clad pneumatic one. Mostly, though, it’s because she has done incredibly well for herself. That her achievements include being able to walk in a pair of strappy high heels - well, so what? It’s an achievement that will serve her better than being able to run really fast from the police in a pair of trainers.

There were the inevitable protesters outside the event at the Hilton last week. They held up placards that said “Beauty is not skin deep” and “Every woman is a queen”. The slogans are nice and it would be lovely if they were true - but the fact of the matter is, they aren’t. Not every woman is a queen and for most people living in the first world in the 21st century, beauty is skin deep. If you’re plain as a pikestaff, you can be the most charming, intelligent woman in the world but try sitting alone in a bar and see how many people offer to buy you drinks (yes, I know you can buy your own drinks. Just as well, in the circs).

Sandrine Leveque, of the feminist campaign group Object (geddit?), said: “We strongly believe that beauty contests like Miss England are clearly sexist and send out the message that it is acceptable to treat women as sex objects. This is not progress. Fundamentally, beauty contests have no place in 2009.”

This was a view I shared - I wrote, for example, about the grotesque misogyny that seemed to me to be apparent in another beauty contest last year, in Miss University London. But I think I might be changing my mind. The fact is that beauty is rewarded in real life: scientists tell us that even babies prefer prettier mothers. It’s all very well objecting to objectification, but the hackneyed 1970s-style slogans fail to take into account how fantastically good women have become at objectifying themselves over the past 30 years - not because they’re stupid or misguided when it comes to sexual politics, but because they like it. They like the fact that they can look like a nerd or, with a little effort, like a dolly. And when they tire of looking like a dolly, they can go back to splitting the atom or training for the heptathlon.

What about the ogling male judges? Well - what about them? There are ogling men everywhere. Ogling men may be unpleasant, but they’re not scary. The ludicrous idea that they’re raping everybody with their eyes is well past its sell-by date.

So yes, a U-turn. If you ignore the working mothers/stay-at-home-ones debate, beauty pageants have become the last remaining area where women feel they can sit in judgment on other women. The assumption – an incredibly patronising one - is always that the poor, pretty simpletons are just too thick to think for themselves. I don’t think Rachel Christie is remotely idiotic. I think she’s an inspiration.

The runner-up, by the way, was Lance-Corporal Kat Hodge, 22. She won a commendation for bravery while serving in Iraq when she was just 18. You may continue to patronise these women if you like. I wouldn’t dare.

+ Young French women are reportedly abandoning topless sunbathing. The mayor of St Tropez said last week that the notion of rows of topless women sunbathers - long synonymous with les vacances - had become outdated. Younger French women, it would appear, are choosing to cover up, some on health grounds, some because of “feminist priorities”.

The former reason makes sense; the latter, in the context of France, is completely non-sensical. There are no feminist priorities in France, as I am often reminded by exasperated girlfriends who live in Paris. The country is steeped in misogyny to a degree unimaginable in the United States or Britain; no wonder they keep garlanding male film-makers who create movies about brutalised women mutilating their genitalia in the name of “art” - La Pianiste a few years ago and now Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year (there was also Monica Bellucci being horrendously raped in Irréversible, 2002).

If French women want to shake things up a bit, they might adopt a more quizzical approach to their husbands’ inalienable “right” to have a mistress or ask themselves why, by law, they have to ask “permission” of same husbands to keep their married name if they get divorced. Sticking on a one-piece swimsuit is like putting a Hello Kitty plaster on an amputation: as grand gestures go, it is risible.

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