There She Goes, Miss America.
Congratulations, spoilsports. You’ve killed Miss America.
Happy?
No doubt you heard. The Miss America pageant has scrapped its swimsuit competition. Apparently, that portion of the event gave the impression that the contest was based on looks, rather than on charitable deeds and saintliness.
Uhhhh, I hate to point this out, but despite billing itself as a “scholarship” pageant, Miss America has always celebrated beauty. Not the inner variety, either. The kind that shines when young women parade around in high heels and bikinis.
After all, Miss America began in the 1920s as an Atlantic City bathing beauty contest.
Over the nearly 100 years it's been in existence, the organizers added elements that required the girls to look smashing in evening gowns, be able to string together a few coherent sentences and demonstrate a molecule of talent.
But it didn’t matter if you were the best orator on the planet and able to sing like an angel. If you looked like a troll you weren’t winning. Or even getting on the stage.
That was fine with the television audience. Although, to be fair, the number of folks tuning in has been in free fall. According to the Orlando Sentinel, 33.1 million viewers watched Miss America in 1988. Last year that number was an anemic 5.4 million.
Seems like Miss America was already on life support. Now the organizers have pulled the plug.
The new contest - no longer a pageant, they say - is going to “celebrate women of all shapes and sizes.”
Geez. If we want to look at that, we’ll go to Walmart.
Will someone please explain what’s wrong with gorgeous women competing for a crown?
These pretty contestants spend their teenage years entering beauty pageants. Not something I would have done - even if I'd had the looks, which I didn't - but these girls are as passionate about pageants as other teenaged girls are about horses, field hockey or drama. It's their hobby. Their choice. Isn't that what feminism is all about, giving women options?
It’s not like there aren’t plenty of competitions that allow unattractive people. The Nobel prizes, for instance, don’t take facial features into consideration. Neither do the Pulitzers. Or the Booker Prize for literature.
Why shouldn’t those whose most striking assets are their faces and derrieres get a shot at a sash and some recognition?
Speaking for the governing body of the Miss America pageant, former Fox news anchor Gretchen Carlson who was Miss America 1989, proudly announced this week that “We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance."
That’s a little like the organizers of the Scripps National Spelling Bee announcing that they're opening their televised finals to any child who can work his or her way through C-A-T because the competition in the past discriminated against kids who couldn't spell.
Here’s the thing. Physical beauty isn’t something invented by horny American men. Science has shown again and again that humans are hard-wired to prefer attractive features over unattractive ones. Babies as young as one day old express preferences for pretty faces over ugly mugs.
The Miss America competition - dated as it is - celebrates comely American women. But the virtue-signaling knotheads in charge seem determined to turn it into something else.
What that will be is unclear. But one thing's certain. It won't be wearing a bikini.
