Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News anchor who took down her boss, sexual harasser Roger Ailes, is the new chair of the Miss America pageant, whose crown she won in 1989. She hopes to "move this iconic program forward," she wrote on Twitter, after the fallout from the recent revelation that pageant executives demeaned former winners in email.
Men and women in the Miss America management and on its nonprofit board engaged in banter about "formers," as ex-winners are called, saying things like "80 percent of the winners do not have the class, smarts and model for success" and "We also have to punish them when they don't appreciate what we do for them." Elsewhere, they lament that one former winner didn't die, and ask if "we four [are] the only ones not to have" had sex with one specific Miss America. And no, they did not say "have sex."
The emails confirm everything I thought about beauty pageants, which is that they put lipstick on the big, ugly pig of misogyny.
Contestants say that pageants give them skills and confidence. "What kept bringing me back is the skills I acquired competing in pageantry, which is often overlooked," Leanne Baum, Miss Long Island Teen 2010, told me; she mentioned public speaking as one of the skills she gained.
These arguments aren't wrong, but they are not good arguments, because everything that you work hard at builds your work ethic: entomology, origami, gardening, micro-brewing, Rubik's Cube, Minecraft. Everything that involves striving teaches that, with striving, you improve.
It's true that the public presentation is more specific to pageants. What unites the Q-and-A event and the swimsuit walk (sort of) is training in a certain vague quality that pageant boosters call "poise." And many pageant participants go on to careers in theater and television.
But still: Why evening wear? Why swimsuits? Why swimsuits with heels? There are activities for women that don't require thinness, height and wearing bikinis indoors.
Beauty pageants can help people grow. But perhaps they can hinder us too. In Carlson's career, one senses that her growing political consciousness is straining against the apolitical mask that her pageant success required.
And the emails remind us that pageants exist in a society that still judges women more than men for their looks.
Editorial on 01/06/2018