The Miss America Pageant: New Wine in An Old, Shriveled, Timeworn Teat of a Wineskin?

Not to be a complete wet blanket, I have to credit the folks at TLC who helped make last night's Miss America pageant a little more culturally relevant.

I say, a little more. But in a world where the pretty girls aren't giving us much to look at - whether it's the recovering Lindsay Lohan, or the abusive Naomi Campbell, or the disintegrating Britney Spears [do your own damn web search] - I'm beginning to wonder about the cultural relevance of a contest in which young women, under the guise of nubile virginity, are rewarded largely on the basis of physical attractiveness, with points thrown in for performing a few tricks they learned in finishing school, and speaking in complete sentences that demonstrate effective deployment of clauses like "I believe that" and "such as."

Is there anything wrong with acknowledging hotness? I don't think so. It depends on circumstances, but that's for another post, isn't it?

But is there anything wrong with two equally-qualified people receiving the same pay for the same work, the same seniority, the same achievements? There shouldn't be. But I have to wonder whether the beauty pageant mentality - perpetuated by these resucitation attempts - somehow filters its way into how "female achievement" is defined.

Perhaps I am making a spurious correllation here. One doesn't directly cause the other... but maybe both are symptoms of larger issues that threaten to hamstring a society's development, precisely because they threaten to hamstring one very large segment of that society.

What other indicators can we check besides this redirection of energy into Miss America?

Perhaps the already-tired media obsession with race versus gender politics, despite the outcry over its irrelevance, should get us thinking.

Perhaps the confluence of the conservative stacking of the Supreme Court, the emphasis on abstinence-only sex education, the coincidental uptick in (especially teen) pregnancies and drop in abortion rates, and the gag-order aesthetic that has crept into the "girl in trouble" film genre - exemplified in Juno - should give us pause.

Maybe the very act of removing a child from a parked car - a habit of attention we have strangely naturalized as "instinctive" despite the artificiality of automotive technology and our stimulus-saturated environments - and the huge disparity in prosecution and sentencing depending on who has committed that sin of omission - should make us wonder whether we really have interrogated our assumptions about what is appropriately "male" and "female."

Because a revamped beauty pageant, whatever else it does show, will not offer a peek at the machinery of assumptions, stereotypes and institutional biases that drives it.

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