When I arrive at the Miss World hotel at Tower Bridge, London, the contestants are sharing the hotel with an insurance claims and fraud summit. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Young women in blue spangled sashes – Miss This and Miss That – loiter at the check-in desk and mingle with insurance executives, who are as grey as you could imagine. They are two flocks of birds: pigeons and peacocks; and the pigeons stare at the peacocks not with lust, but with awe.

I am here because when I was a child I loved Miss World. It was like contemplating a doll’s house I would never be admitted to – and that was fine. I think I knew it, even then, that such beauty is a complex gift. Even so, I used to watch it with my mother and wonder which, of all of them, was the most beautiful. Then I grew up, became a second-wave feminist and felt queasily guilty, for the Miss World of that era is now remembered as the very definition of objectification.

Am I here because I am still wondering which, of all of them, is the most beautiful? Obviously. Objectification dies hard; or, in the culture that produced Love Island, not at all. But there are other, more interesting questions to ask: what is Miss World’s place now, in the era of body positivism and fourth-wave feminism? What contortions has she made in her 68th year? Why is she still here, when food rationing has gone?

The official answer is humanitarianism, which seems like public relations until you look at the numbers. Since 1971, when Julia Morley, the wife of the competition’s founder Eric Morley, became more involved, Miss World has raised more than $1bn for charity. The beauty is undeniable – the smell of shampoo emanates through this brutalist hotel; it is the hot UN – but it is put to work. This is the week the contestants are going to the Oxford Union and to visit Zandra Rhodes, and they update their social media constantly to promote Miss World and her causes. In this sense Miss World is rather like a conclave of medieval queens with internet access. They have an app called MobStar, so the voyeur can experience Miss World as a reality TV show, with all the common surfaces: smiles, cocktail dresses, international locations, teeth.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest This year’s models: some of the 96 contestants hoping to be crowned Miss World. Next week’s final will be watched by more than 900 million people in 140 countries. Photograph: Sophia Spring/The Observer

There is something else, though, which is fascinating: Miss World seems, in 2019, to be determined to deny a reputation she no longer has; there is a defensiveness here, a desire to prove her usefulness. If it is penance it is unnecessary. The fourth wave of feminism has no problem with Miss World, who is very experienced at innocence; it has forgotten her. Miss World is rather prim for these filthy, righteous days: a purity cult whose priestesses have faux-aristocratic manners that are rather better than the manners of real aristocrats; but are so odd, nonetheless, as to be charming. The second-wave feminists hated Miss World; but the fourth wave don’t even think about it. I don’t think they know that here yet.

Miss World began in 1951 at the Festival of Britain, the invention of the Mecca dance hall executive Eric Morley. It was the biggest annual show on earth, although it is no longer on the mainstream channels and will stream this year on London Live. If its reach has ebbed in western Europe – it is no longer a sign of nationhood, like a free press or a liberal democracy – it is huge in China and India, and satellites are booked to beam it across the world, timed to hit the US at breakfast and Asia at supper. More than 900 million people will watch it in 140 countries, and about 100 million will vote in the public rounds.

1970 was the year of Miss World’s original trauma, when the 20th competition at the Royal Albert Hall was disrupted. Feminists concealed in an audience composed mostly of women who had won bingo competitions at Mecca, threw flour bombs over Bob Hope, the host. The Angry Brigade anarchists set off a bomb under a BBC van, hoping to disrupt the transmission, and the windows blew out. Even so, Jennifer Hosten, Miss Grenada, was crowned Miss World. Joan Collins was one of the judges. The story is told in a film that opens next year, Misbehaviour, starring Keira Knightley.

I wonder if today, with the emphasis on philanthropy and the ostentatious decency – some contestants are wearing gloves indoors, like the Queen – they are, psychologically, still in 1970, and that is understandable. You repeat a trauma continually, until you expiate it.

There were other controversies for a competition that seemed, for obvious reasons, to be a perfect victim. From 1970-76 they accepted both a black and a white candidate from South Africa. Almost all the contestants come from democracies. China does compete, but there is no Miss Saudi Arabia, no Miss Iran, and no Miss North Korea. There is instead a Miss Korea.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crowning glory: Bob Hope with Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hosten, who became Miss World at the controversial 1970 ceremony. Photograph: Peter King/Getty Images

In 1974, Marjorie Wallace, Miss America, was dethroned for immorality of the most thrilling kind: she was photographed kissing Tom Jones while engaged to a famous racing driver, although she is still on the website that functions as the wall of fame. In 1980, Gabriella Brum, Miss Germany, resigned after nude photographs emerged. The Pope complained, but he always does. There is no Miss Vatican City either, which is disappointing. They should send a nun.

I watch this year’s hopefuls walk out to the riverside by Tower Bridge for the press launch. They look both similar and various. Most are very young. None are overweight, of course; in this sense Miss World is immune to the fashionable diktats of equality. But she is multicultural by nature. Not all of them are dressed like Ivanka Trump, but most are; one is dressed like Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce (Miss Italy in a black suit); another as Morticia Addams (Miss Peru in a bat cape). Later, one will wear a Russian-style fur hat; another a vast feathered headdress.

A choreographer prods them into a line, and they retire to a press room for interviews. Some are attached to their telephones, making videos for MobStar; winning the social media category can process you onwards. There are other heats for talent, charity and sport; you can watch all this on YouTube, where Miss World has its own channel. When they are needed for an interview, a Miss World employee shouts “Scotland!” or “Sweden!” or “Belgium!” Views across the social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and MobStar – are already above 1bn, and it is only the first day.

I meet Julia Morley, Eric’s widow of 19 years, in a room with huge windows overlooking the bridge. When I allude to Miss World in the 1950s she sighs slightly. “There was nothing wrong with it in those days,” she says. “You have to realise it was 1951, just after the war, London had been bombed to pieces.” That is an odd defence – beauty pageants were necessary to recover from Hitler – and unnecessary, because the more time I spend here, the better I like it. It’s odd, of course, like wandering up a Magic Faraway Tree. But we are in the middle of a fierce election, and this much politesse is soothing, wherever it comes from.

If it is a pastiche of good manners, it is better than the original and I am fond of oddness of all kinds. “Today, of course, you would say Women’s Lib,” Morley says, “but you have to look at the era.” It was acceptable for silent women to wear bikinis on the stage. It was institutional sexism. I condemn my 11-year-old self for her sexism but, in my defence, I liked the evening gown round best.

I think, behind her serenity – she sets an example – the sexism really bothered Morley; either that or she is the most cynical person who has ever lived, and I don’t believe that. She describes her thoughts about the contest in 1970: “I don’t really have a strong view. I’m not there to jump on anyone’s bandwagon and get involved with things I didn’t worry about too much at the time.” She laughs. “It was a huge success,” she says, “and because it was so successful they continued to run it as a public relations exercise, and all the money raised went to the Variety Club. But that was then.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winning votes: the Morleys out canvassing with Margaret and Denis Thatcher in south London, where Eric stood as a Tory in 1979. Photograph: Getty Images

Morley tells me a story about a charity worker she met in Singapore, whom she saw tending to beggars from her hotel room. She tells the story in great detail, and slowly, because it is important: her creation story. “I said to the woman: ‘Don’t you ever get tired of this?’ It wasn’t quite as I meant it to come out. ‘Is it not better,’ the woman replied, ‘to light one candle in the darkness than not to see at all?’ It’s not usual,” says Morley, “for me to jump at something like that, but it did mean a lot to me. I thought: that is what I should be doing. Was I comfortable seeing them wander about in swimsuits? They didn’t really have a chance to show who they were… just their bodies. And,” she adds carefully, “there was nothing wrong with that.”

She changed Miss World’s course with a programme called Beauty with a Purpose: what a pointed title. Today all the contestants promote a cause in their homeland, and a willingness to do so is essential to success; beauty pageantry reinvented as workaholism. Miss World is a job now, and the job is decency in silks. They are not social justice activists, although their impact, with their humanitarian work, is the same: they do it, rather, without anger and without politics.

In 2011, to mark its 40th birthday, Nelson Mandela sent a message of congratulations. Morley spends the rest of the hour speaking about her causes: parasites in children’s feet, easily cured if you care; an unstable bridge which maimed a child; the production of food. They are more interesting to her than the logistics of Miss World, which she has lived with for 60 years.

I also meet the current Miss World, the former Miss Mexico, Vanessa Ponce. She seems extraordinarily alive; very emotionally porous; and winning; that is, she is the kind of person it is impossible not to love. There wasn’t much money growing up – she applied for a scholarship to study international business in Germany and failed. “I wanted to be free,” she says. That had been her idea of freedom, but she knows better now; this is her considered narrative. Instead she won Mexico’s Next Top Model: “I started feeling very empty. People are not very nice to you. They treat you as a product.”

She did one last commercial for a migrant shelter. She stayed for three weeks; peeled carrots; helped a woman give birth. That, then, is her creation story. They all have one. She spends more time in airports than she does in Mexico now. She speaks about Miss World as if it is a spiritually transformative experience: “It makes you more patient, more tolerant, you start seeing everyone as an equal.” She says she needs “to feel useful”. Then she says: “The job is to be there for people, to show them there is faith. People need to feel that warmth from you. That is what Miss World is – a light to guide you on.” That looks ridiculous in print, but it wasn’t from her mouth. “I have never been the most beautiful,” she says, “I’m an average beauty.” I’m aghast by how she coolly measures it; it is the most mortal she sounds. “And I don’t really care about that.” Her job is to “be that person that inspires all this. Imagine the figure of a woman that you admire. What are the qualities?”

Certainly, they all seem happy, and who wants a depressed beauty queen?

I meet many others – pageant queens, lawyers, doctors, professional rugby players – and they all carefully, or dramatically, emit some version of this in unembarrassed rote, with varying degrees of intensity and eloquence; and it is soothing. It is narcotic and, though I don’t believe in it all – some are simply models burnishing their brand, or holidaying in London – I like listening to them try to conjure it into being, even if they do sound a lot like the Duchess of Sussex; and I don’t know what it costs them, and I don’t know how long it will last. Certainly, they seem happy, and who wants a depressed beauty queen? Miss World is also a place in which they can exist online, protected from abuse; no such protections exist on Instagram.

So, it was oddly pure in the end – and to a woman, unthreatening, which is probably why I left the hotel imagining I loved them. Miss World now is more like a religious movement with a commercial arm than something to excite the male gaze and devastate the female one with miserable comparisons. Morley has, with her obsessive focus on philanthropy, stripped all sex from the contest. I wonder if it is penance for the awful sexism that came before; or revenge on the men who performed it. Either way, Miss World is a glowing archetype; and how you view her, as ever, depends on where, exactly, on the feminist spectrum you stand.

Miss World 2019 will be crowned on 14 December in London