Editorial: Sad to say goodbye to Waimarama Beach Day

There will not be a Waimarama beach day next year. Photo / File

It's a little sad to see the sun set on the Waimarama Beach Day.

For years, it's been a staple of the summer social calendar, with the Miss Waimarama and Mr Waimarama event as its fun centrepiece.

Great for the community too, but for the foreseeable future, it's off.

It has been an annual attraction since the early 1990s, and it's also the biggest annual fundraiser for the Waimarama Surf Lifesaving Club.

The local dairy owner won't be happy - there will have been a lot of icecreams sold on that day, each year.

There is the school of thought that "Miss" pageants are well past their use-by date, although as a former Miss Waimarama has pointed out, there is not a lot of pageantry involved - turn up in your bikini or boardies and away you go.

Still, they tend to be one step forward for the contestants and two steps back for feminism. Crowds gathering to ogle young women in their bikinis is no longer an acceptable social norm, even with the consent of the willing participants. In public at least.

In the privacy of your own home, should you so choose, you can view scores of young women scattered across social media, faces rendered virtually unrecognisable by a botox needle, pouting in what seems like an endless stream of selfies. And they get paid to do it - influencers we call them.

Their social media platforms are littered with products that they endorse, encouraging their thousands of followers to part with their money.

Many followers fail to make the correlation between the products, the influencer and the money the influencer is paid to say nice things about the product.

It's not just the lips that are fake.

Suddenly, a Miss Waimarama pageant doesn't look too stale after all.