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The eye of the beholder
May. 2nd, 2009 01:56 pmI have to confess that I am ambivalent towards beauty pageants. I have long believed that any private organization has the right to think what they want, and the rest of us have the right to gauge their relevance based on those choices. This believe tends to be the only thing that gets me through the Grammy Awards and the selection of popes. But maybe ten or so years ago I watched the Miss America pageant (back in those olden days when it was on broadcast television) expecting to howl with self-righteous derision, and I didn't. From what I could see, the contestants were entirely intelligent, athletic, socially-aware young women. To be sure, there was a lack of pear-shaped body types and no physical disabilities to be seen, but I had the sensation that the judges were basing their decision on their thoughts and deeds rather than how they looked in a bathing suit and heels. I was impressed.
Alas, the Miss America pageant has fallen on hard times and so every time a beauty pageant makes the news nowadays it is the Miss USA contest, which seems to have much lower standards. So here is where you find national-level beauty queens abusing cocaine during their reign, hilarious YouTube videos where final round contestants teach us about education in South Africa and The Iraq and such as, and the current tempest of Miss California USA feeling that she came in second place because she was blindsided into announcing her distaste for same-sex marriage. I have reached my ruling.
Carrie Prejean, sit down. Let's gird ourselves and face your declaration of sentiments:
"I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be between a man and a woman."
Really? I mean, you live in California and went to college in 2008. It was a conservative Christian college, but surely there was discussion that Proposition 8 was going on outside. And yet you are so stunned by the issue that you invent the phrase "opposite marriage"? The word "heterosexual" was beyond you at that moment? That's not politics, that's vocabulary. And poise. And expressing the belief that it's great that same-sex marriage exists and, you know what, it should be outlawed is quite a muddle. If this answer cost you the Miss USA crown, it is because it was dreadfully inarticulate, not because it was a bold conservative vision statement. And if you are stripped of your Miss California USA title in the next few weeks, it is because you haven't shown up to cut the ribbon at malls or whatever it is that you do, so I don't want to hear your victimization speech then either.
(ETA: And when I said that, it was implied that I really really don't want to hear your victimization speech when your underage topless modeling photos get leaked to the public. No link to the picture, because child pornography is, for better or worse, in the eye of the District Attorneys of the world and not the beholders.)
Donald Trump, go away and take your idiot pageant with you.
"Miss California has done a wonderful job, that was her belief [...] It wasn't a bad answer, that was simply her belief...."
How on earth can you have a interview category and borking a question this badly doesn't drop you below second place? (And, for the record, Laura Caitlin Upton came in fourth after her dreadful answer to an admittedly much harder question about geographic literacy.) If you're not grading them on how they communicate their ideas, then replace it with a teleprompter-reading category, unless it's actually about how you enjoy the publicity of watching contestants fail. When a pageant team decides that it is a better use of their funds to give breast augmentation to their contestant instead of bettering local disadvantaged kids or whatever, you have to know that you fail as a selector of what is beautiful in this world.
Everyone else, take a deep breath. She doesn't like gay marriage. Nearly half of California doesn't. We can expose her to the healthiness of love in all of its incarnations, or we can let her fester in her ghetto of intolerance. I think we'll get where we're going faster if we do the former, don't you?
Alas, the Miss America pageant has fallen on hard times and so every time a beauty pageant makes the news nowadays it is the Miss USA contest, which seems to have much lower standards. So here is where you find national-level beauty queens abusing cocaine during their reign, hilarious YouTube videos where final round contestants teach us about education in South Africa and The Iraq and such as, and the current tempest of Miss California USA feeling that she came in second place because she was blindsided into announcing her distaste for same-sex marriage. I have reached my ruling.
Carrie Prejean, sit down. Let's gird ourselves and face your declaration of sentiments:
"I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be between a man and a woman."
Really? I mean, you live in California and went to college in 2008. It was a conservative Christian college, but surely there was discussion that Proposition 8 was going on outside. And yet you are so stunned by the issue that you invent the phrase "opposite marriage"? The word "heterosexual" was beyond you at that moment? That's not politics, that's vocabulary. And poise. And expressing the belief that it's great that same-sex marriage exists and, you know what, it should be outlawed is quite a muddle. If this answer cost you the Miss USA crown, it is because it was dreadfully inarticulate, not because it was a bold conservative vision statement. And if you are stripped of your Miss California USA title in the next few weeks, it is because you haven't shown up to cut the ribbon at malls or whatever it is that you do, so I don't want to hear your victimization speech then either.
(ETA: And when I said that, it was implied that I really really don't want to hear your victimization speech when your underage topless modeling photos get leaked to the public. No link to the picture, because child pornography is, for better or worse, in the eye of the District Attorneys of the world and not the beholders.)
Donald Trump, go away and take your idiot pageant with you.
"Miss California has done a wonderful job, that was her belief [...] It wasn't a bad answer, that was simply her belief...."
How on earth can you have a interview category and borking a question this badly doesn't drop you below second place? (And, for the record, Laura Caitlin Upton came in fourth after her dreadful answer to an admittedly much harder question about geographic literacy.) If you're not grading them on how they communicate their ideas, then replace it with a teleprompter-reading category, unless it's actually about how you enjoy the publicity of watching contestants fail. When a pageant team decides that it is a better use of their funds to give breast augmentation to their contestant instead of bettering local disadvantaged kids or whatever, you have to know that you fail as a selector of what is beautiful in this world.
Everyone else, take a deep breath. She doesn't like gay marriage. Nearly half of California doesn't. We can expose her to the healthiness of love in all of its incarnations, or we can let her fester in her ghetto of intolerance. I think we'll get where we're going faster if we do the former, don't you?
