Miss America is Doing Away with Swimsuits and No Longer Interested in Looks
Source – The next edition of the Miss America pageant will scrap swimsuits and will be more inclusive to women of all sizes, the contest announced Tuesday.
Gretchen Carlson, the chairwoman of the Miss America board of directors, announced on “Good Morning America” that the event will no longer feature a swimsuit competition
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Miss America will be a competition, not a pageant, Carlson said on the show Tuesday.
“We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That’s huge,” she said.
Carlson also said the new Miss America competition will be more inclusive to women of “all shapes and sizes.”
I’ve been waiting for America to reach this moment. This what I’ll call Bridge on the River Kwai moment. After that part at the end when Alec Guinness has been leading his British POWs to build a railroad bridge for their Japanese captors to boost their morale. And when it’s fully functional and he sees how he’s helped and given aid to the enemy and he says “What have I done?” This is our “What have I done?” moment.
So now we’re not going to judge a beauty pageant by the standards of beauty. Because …? Just because, I guess. Because we’ve reached a point where we finally decided to just cave into the forces who are offended by the physical attractiveness of others. They managed to somehow makes us their prisoners and we built a railroad bridge of inclusiveness over their River Low Self-Esteem. And in doing so, given care and aid to our own captors.
You know what Gretchen Carlson was doing 30 years ago? Winning the Miss America pageant. And believe me, it wasn’t on the basis of her inner beauty. It was because she was hot, looked good in a bikini and probably worked her ass off in the gym to make certain of it. And parlayed that into a very successful, lucrative career looking good on TV. So now that she’s gotten hers, she’s going to claim she’s got sympathy for all the less pretty, less in-shape women out there by eliminating the very thing her success in based on. When really all she’s doing is pulling the ladder up behind her and making sure there’ll be no more younger Gretchen Carlsons.
A for the tiny minority who’ve been calling for this and will claim victory, I’ve never understood their reasoning. My kind of feminist is a strong-willed, independent, tough-minded woman who isn’t triggered by someone else’s looks. Who is no more intimidated by another woman’s beauty than I am about Rob Gronkowski’s size and athleticism. My mom was a widow raising and providing for five kids. And believe me, she wasn’t offended by beauty queens or the glamorous Hollywood stars she admired so much. She looked like her and they looked like them and it would never have occurred to her that they shouldn’t look so good because she couldn’t compete with that.
I suppose you can call me a feminist too, since I’m a big believer in women doing what they want with their own bodies. All women. Even the physically fit and beautiful ones. Which puts me in a minority, I guess. A lot of the same people who applaud the “courage” of Lena Dunham getting naked in Girls on HBO are mortally wounded by the thought of a 20ish Gretchen Carlson walking across a stage in a two-piece. Or think Barstool is somehow sexist because we provide a space for attractive adult women who want to put their photos on our site. When really all their doing is dictating to their fellow women what they should and should not wear, because they themselves can’t handle it. It’s just a subtler, watered down version of the rules Al Qaeda and ISIS make for women. And the question is how much longer they’ll keep watering it down.
So congrats, Miss America. Best of luck to you going forward now that your competition will be based solely on … what, exactly? The talent competition? Right. The nation doesn’t have enough TV talent competitions. The Q&A portion? Yeah, that is not exactly your strongest segment. But I’m sure you’re ratings will skyrocket now once America gets word they’ll get to see mediocre women fully dressed competition on who’s got the most inner beauty. Actually, never mind. We’ll all just keep watching Miss USA. And in the meantime, you’ve probably just helped Trump get a 100,000 more votes.
