Because it was satirical and funny as hell.
It sounds cringy as hell. Would it have been as funny if the women were replaced by Blacks? Having never seen it, I can’t imagine what was funny.
Well, I guess that’s your problem, isn’t it?
I remember taking a mild interest in the Miss America and Miss Universe pageants way back in elementary school – largely because we had only one TV and I could either do my homework while sitting and watching it with my sister and mother or I could do my homework alone in my room. Either way I wasn’t going to see The Six Million Dollar Man that night.
And, besides, Bert made a big deal about the swimsuit competition and I was a twelve-year-old boy hitting puberty. Naturally I stayed up and watched all the other sections that came before it.
But in the late-seventies, beauty contests in general took a tarnish when one of my favorite bands put out a song about Miss America. James Young really ripped into the industry for its shallowness and fair-weather capriciousness, and the song by Styx was a rather nice rocker on the back-side of their Grand Illusion album. A few years later there was the Vanessa Williams scandal. It seemed to be big news (and since it was the early 1980’s it probably got hyped both for its salaciousness and the racial angle) but I was already beyond caring about the pageants anyway.
And then Burt Parks passed and it really seemed like a good idea to just let those old annual programs fade away. It seemed to me that the real beauty of a person wasn’t how they performed in entertainment routines and answering specially-formed questions but in how they behaved toward regular people every day – and that’s not the kind of stuff that fills a 3-hour pageant program or sells vanity commercials very well. And then when it was newsworthy that Donald Trump had bought the Miss America pageant in order to keep it going, I thought, “First off, what does a hotel tycoon know about running a beauty pageant? And second-off, how can this guy who’s already famous for being rude not turn this scandal-rocked contest into something more scandalous?”
And the rest, of course, is well-documented history (some of it even autobiographical).
I’m not accusing the youth leader’s wife of anything, but I had read in the biography of a major porn star that she had made her way to Hollywood because one of the prizes in the small-town beauty pageant she won was a Greyhound ticket to anywhere. A few years later I read in an interview of another famous porn star (-turned-regular-actress) that she had won her small-town beauty contest and, again, one of the prizes was a Greyhound ticket to anywhere.$ It kind-of made me wonder if small towns hold their little beauty contests with a goal of getting rid of the average girls’ major competition – “You’ve won! You’re beautiful! Go make yourself a star (and don’t come back)!”
But quite frankly I never thought much more about the matter.
I honestly don’t think they’re useful any more – a waste of money and organizational skills and talents, et cetera.
- You’re beautiful and you can sing or dance or make music? Wonderful, do the ground work, find an agent, pay your dues in the entertainment industry of your choice, and make that pay off; don’t expect a pageant sash will vault you past the other hard-working hopefuls in the same industry.
- You’re smart? Don’t prove it with a quip about your naive idealistic dream of achieving world peace; publish, explain and defend your dissertation on realistically resolving the root causes of international crisis, or efficiently redistributing surplus food stocks to regional hotspots suffering from famine, or even *improving communications between disparate network protocols based on incompatible legacy hardware."#
- You’re agile, athletic, and ethical? Any law enforcement agency would love to sign you up! Go through the academy first.
Beauty contest ‘talents’ should be put to better use than demeaning the participants and putting them on display like a block of meat.
That must be from the early 1970’s. I suspect Miss Congeniality (Sandra Bullock, 2000 and a sequel in 2005 so only a quarter-century-old) is probably more modern and relevant. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was an attempt to remake that one.
–G!
$I don’t search these things out. The teasers were included in Google News headlines, scraped from other news and journalism sites.
#My point, really, is that if you’re really smart, you’ll do more than throw out a quaint little quip; you’ll put those brains to work earning a PhD – which means contributing something to the scholarly literature of a field. I’ll appreciate you more for doing that than for having a pretty face. Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the planet has far outweighed Helen of Troy’s beauty.
It was in the early '70s, so I don’t doubt Bullock’s movies are indeed more modern and relevant.
The Steve Allen special was a parody of a pageant that showed how stupid they really are. It was a brilliant work of satire that had me almost rolling on the floor with laughter.
A little later than 2005, but you might appreciate 2009’s Whip It, about a girl who is forced to participate in beauty pageants by her mother, a former low-level beauty pageant queen. But the girl (played by Ellen Page, as he was known then) doesn’t want to be in beauty pageants; she wants to play roller derby. She is not so good at beauty pageants, but she is surprisingly good at roller derby. Mother, of course, hates it; and feels that her daughter should be more into beauty pageants than roller derby.
It’s an interesting look at who enters beauty pageants, why they do it, and who pushes them to do so.
And then, of course, there’s the icky child beauty pageants, which probably supply many of the entrants of these older contests when the time is right.
I’m the same. The last time I watched was in the early 80s. Sure, I have caught news clips and other snippets here and there since but I have no interest. Nothing about these pageants interests me and I say that as a heterosexual man who likes seeing beautiful women as much as the next guy (and that includes my teenage years when I was more…smitten by beautiful women).
How those are left to continue I will never know. Foul things. I am appalled at the parents that put their children through that.
Miss Universe and its Miss USA subsidiaries. Different organizations (and the Miss America people could not make the point enough whether or not you asked).
Interestingly in later years as Miss America declined it seems to have been more willing to try different ways to update the gig, with mixed results.
Yeah, I was able to pick that up from the poster.
Miss Universe was a fun lark back when they’d have the broadcast with the full parade-of-absurd-theme-outfits. But eventually they could not buy enough US network time so they abridged the broadcast down to only-the-final and once all you were getting was the last 12 going through their contrived answers to the “relevant question”, it was like, who cares.
And a lot of people were suspicious for a long time as to just how undesirable a working environment Miss U/Miss USA/Miss USA Teen were. It seems that it’s been either getting worse, or not getting with the program fast enough, as the various new managements flail about to try to keep it profitable.
Wow, thank you for this link! What we have here, I believe, is something that WAS an integral part of America becoming a thing of the past and, as so often is the case, the denial that is resulting in its slow and painful death. It’s a gruesome thing to see.
And of course, because humanity deserves the ass-smiting it’s been getting, the socialnets and news outlet comment sections are full of yoyos piping up with “it’s because now they are letting men compete”. 
Not to mention his chance to burst into their locker rooms.
Nothing will beat The $1.98 Beauty Show for satire.
Today I Learned…
The word yesternight.
I can honestly say I’ve never watched a pageant all the way through. Probably the only exposure I’ve had to pageants in the last 20 years is that viral video of the contestant giving a stumbling answer and Trump’s “they let you do it” interview.
Hell, if that’s your yardstick, you could shut down network TV altogether. Does the Bachelor bring anything useful to the table? 2 Broke Girls? Deal or no deal? Keeping Up with the Kardashians?
Much TV and social media isn’t ‘useful’ in any meaningful sense.
Wow, I had forgotten about that! Was it as good as The Gong Show?
Better because I don’t think the contestants took themselves as seriously so less of a cringe factor.
No and no.
I Am Silenced Hip. Does the ‘Hip’ part mean anything?