David McRaney  |  Journalist

Pageant contests do not deserve scholarships

It is interesting that the winner of the 2005 Miss University of Southern Mississippi Pageant held Jan. 29 is slated to receive a scholarship for her achievement.

Typically, I view the kind of women who participate in beauty pageants as shallow, emotionally bankrupt, vacuous, cardboard cutout, instantly forgettable, plastic imbeciles rewarded for their least redeeming, most superfluous and largely ephemeral qualities.

Yet, this pageant, in its 58th year, claims that physical beauty is not the only thing judged, and that the contestants must have a high grade-point average and be well rounded. But, let's be honest, if the contestants were too "rounded" physically, then they would have no chance at the scholarship would they?

It just does not seem fair that the SGA sponsors a contest of physical appearance for an academic prize. It isn't fair to a plethora of exceptional, yet asymmetrical, women who go to school at USM. To me it represents a throwback to when women were little more than baby-making property who were best seen and not heard.

In general, I consider the beauty pageant to be a culturally cancerous mass that should be taken for what it is, live soft-core pornography. Each pageant has some tired excuse for its existence and a variety of subsets to the main concept of the competition like talents, stage presence, or verbal ability; but, in the end, it's a pretty person competition, and that just seems silly to me.

Consider the roots of the phenomenon. The first beauty pageant was held by P.T. Barnum as part of his seedy underworld of questionable entertainment. It then took off as a way to promote beach businesses with attractive ladies parading in skimpy clothing, eventually snowballing into a huge entertainment production in New Jersey called the Fall Frolic, where a "Miss America" was crowned each year.

For most Americans, the beauty pageant was taken for what it was, titillating sensational entertainment that had no redeeming value. The Miss America pageant, and similar events held about the same status in American society as Girls Gone Wild does today.

Although the Miss America contest enjoyed a lot of positive attention for many years, it started to lose favor in the late '60s as feminists began to criticize all beauty contests as cattle markets for women that was not only degrading to contestants, but damaging to the feminist struggle in general.

I'm not trying to organize a rally for the elimination of the Miss USM pageant. I just find it interesting that such a venue for academic rivalry is so exalted in this day and age.

If such an event were to be held with the same intentions and under the same auspices for men it would be considered a farce, and the competition would be promoted as a humorous romp.

For me, that is exactly what a female beauty contest is, on campus or off, an exclusive farcical comedic parade with no redeeming value other than cheap, lowbrow entertainment. Whether or not it's degrading, I do not necessarily see it as any more of an achievement to win a beauty contest than it is to be in a Girls Gone Wild video, and those girls don't get a scholarship.

Originally published in The Student Printz on February 10, 2005