| My uncle, an educator by trade, told me a story he heard in a professional training about parents who wanted to honor the recent accidental death of their son by donating a building in his name at Harvard, the school he’d attended the year before. Dressed in shoddy, torn clothing, the parents didn’t get any serious attention from Harvard’s president. In fact, they were treated rudely, so they set out on their own and built Leland Stanford Junior University. The tale offers an appropriate moral about making snap judgments based on people’s appearances. It’s a great story, which makes it all the more disappointing that it’s a fable. Leland Stanford (Senior) did visit Harvard, as well as Yale, M.I.T. and Cornell, looking for ideas before building the Palo Alto university that was named after his deceased son. Beyond that, however, the story is another in a long line of Internet fairy tales. Fiction, of course, was not invented on the World Wide Web. Nor was it in Atlantic City, where on Sept. 20 the Miss America Pageant will parade51 women in what it claims is a decades-long tradition of “empowering American women to achieve their personal and professional goals, while providing a forum for them to express their opinions, talents, and intelligence.” Some of the women do have impressive credentials. There’s a doctor in this year’s event. Some will feel empowered by competing and there is about $32 million in scholarships handed out in the pageant and all the ones leading up to it. The interview process the judges employ is by all accounts demanding and requires a solid knowledge of current events. But there will be nary a zit or cellulite on the girls vying for the tiara. And during the contest they’ll install falsies, Vaseline and hemorrhoid cream to accentuate their physical assets. As long as swimsuits and even evening gowns are part of the contest the pageant sends women, those on the stage and those who watch, the message that it’s great to be smart and all, but it’s not complete without a tight butt and something substantial between the belly button and neck. Empowering indeed. Any claim that the swimsuit competition is about fitness fails, because the contest doesn’t answer basic questions. Does she smoke? Does she binge and purge? Is she really a man? If a swimsuit competition is a key element in “a forum for them to express their opinions, talents, and intelligence,” then Hillary Rodham Clinton and Elizabeth Dole should debate on the Senate floor in their french cuts. Certainly, no one is for that. Yet we tacitly accept the notion that the pageant is about empowerment, which many parts of it are, while it requires what amounts to a toned-down bikini contest. The pageant’s zeal for legitimacy is exemplified this year in its choice as a judge of Fox’s legal goddess Greta Van Susteren. In 2002 Van Susteren proved herself a perfect role model for the pageant by celebrating her network switch by getting an eye tuck. Marcia L. Bullard, chief executive officer of the Sunday newspaper insert USA WEEKEND, wrote for the online publication “WomenOf.com” that she would have been more likely to protest the pageant when she was in college in 1974, but in 2000 accepted an invitation to be a judge. “At worst,” she wrote, “the Pageant is an essentially harmless anachronism suffering from the least public acknowledgement and worst TV ratings in its history.” Not so. With the swimsuit competition as a part of the contest, the pageant continues a harmful tradition of objectifying women who are willing participants in a strut for scholarships. |
| The real Miss America fairy tale: It's about empowerment By Steven Gardner September 12, 2003 |
| Note: the inspiration for this column was a story on The Daily Herald (Provo, Utah). The Herald site allows people to make anonymous comments (which really is a bad thing). I made several, including the three questions. I only say this in case someone happened to see it and was wondering if I was plagiarizing. As far as I know I can’t plagiarize myself. To see the tale and the true story of Leland Stanford, go to www.snopes.com/glurge/stanford.htm. |
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