I missed this in one of the earlier links. Julia Long the organiser of the protest responds to Mary Beard:
'As one of the organisers of the protest outside the Miss World contest, I was disappointed that Mary Beard did not take the trouble to inform herself of the nature of the protest before giving her opinions on its supposed redundancy.
If Prof Beard had read our flyers, she would have seen that the protest was directed against what the contest represents, rather than the contestants. We certainly do not see Miss Venezuela as "the enemy" - rather, we oppose the objectification of women that such contests perpetuate.
Our chants make the links between this kind of objectification and other aspects of women's inequality. The "freedom bin", into which we threw lads mags and scalpels, symbolised new forms of sexism that have become normalised in the intervening years between this and the original 1970 Miss World protest. .
Prof Beard claims that the Miss World contest should no longer be a priority for feminists, but merely refers to her own comfort with her ageing body, and new-found personal tolerance of what she sees as the "bodily choices" of others.
While I'm delighted that Mary Beard is comfortable in her body, to conclude from that that battles around female objectification and sexual commodification have been won betrays a serious ignorance of the ongoing issues of ageist and sexist discrimination faced by women in relation to their appearance.
The beauty industry continues to grow even in times of economic downturn. Increasingly intrusive and risky procedures have become far more common since the original Miss World protest in 1970 - from facelifts and silicone breast implants to "nasal tip enhancement", the "internal bra" (a "revolutionary surgical breast support"), labiaplasties and "breast boosters".
Painful practices such as waxing - not only of legs but also underarms and pubic area - have become near-compulsory for young women, alongside dieting, eyebrow threading, spray tans, false lashes, stilettos and visits to the nail bar and the hair salon.
Rather than opposing the dictates and pressures on women to appear a certain way, Prof Beard argues that it is simply a question of "making those constraints work for you". For feminists, however, simplistic notions of "free choice" are seldom an adequate way of explaining gendered social phenomena, and individual adaptations are rarely a solution to structural inequalities.
For those of us protesting outside the Miss World contest, there is a clear relationship between beauty pageants and a massive industry which thrives on selling a message to women of their inherent physical inadequacy and unattractiveness. Beauty contests normalise the judging of women as objects, in spite of the PR-driven efforts of the organisers to make us believe otherwise.
The groups protesting outside Miss World - the London Feminist Network, Million Women Rise, OBJECT, and UK Feminista - campaign energetically on a range of issues including violence against women and justice for rape victims; the government's spending cuts; abortion rights; and the normalisation of pornography and the sex industry. We don't see the Miss World contest as unrelated to these injustices.
An important dimension to the protest was the presence of several of the women from the original 1970 action, who joined a new generation of feminists singing, chanting and laughing. Prof Beard may indeed have "sold out on feminism" and become more conservative in her late middle age, but luckily, others have not."