Kurlekaar's Kaleidoscope - Enter consensus, exit originality?

I was a little disappointed with our Group Discussion session today. The students were asked to choose between two topics and the majority selected “Do beauty contests degrade womanhood?” We had a few girl students in the group and I thought they would really let fly. One girl started, rather defensively, with trying to define ‘womanhood’ first, which, for her, comprised of all roles that a woman was required to play in life; a mother, wife, daughter, sister etc. Somehow woman as an ‘individual’ was missing from her list. She did not think that these beauty contests degraded ‘womanhood’ since they also tested her intelligence, general knowledge and social awareness etc. I was a little taken back when another girl pointed out how answers given by some of the winners showed their deep commitment to these social causes, and which, actually helped them to win their respective contests, but how the same contestants had quickly forgotten about these causes after they had won these contests and apparently had made use of these contests merely as a platform to make their entry, either into the advertising world (if they were not there already), or into Bollywood. Yes, I agreed, but wished she had also pointed out the sole exception of Ms Sushmita Sen for strengthening her argument.

Now it was the turn of the boys. I saw a spark when a young man vehemently argued that that these contests tended to treat woman as mere ‘commodity’ and that, to him, was degrading enough. I felt even better. My happiness was, however, short lived as the peer group pressure started building up against. These two students, now afraid of taking a stand alone stand, succumbed to this peer group pressure, mellowed down, and ultimately joined the group. How consensus kills originality.