No swimsuits for Miss America? Meh.
After nearly a century of scoring women on their looks, the Miss America contest has announced that it is ending the swimsuit portion of the competition.
Starting next September, participants will no longer be required to parade before judges — and an audience of millions of television viewers — in skimpy beach wear and high heels. “We are not going to judge you on your outward appearance,” Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News anchor and current pageant chairwoman, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “We want more women to know that they are welcome in this organization.”
My first thought? Meh.
As much as I tried to muster up strong feelings, nothing bubbled up. Is it good that in the age of #MeToo and female empowerment, judges will focus “more on the contestants’ talents, intelligence and ideas”? Well, of course.
But the truth is, for me, Miss America had long lost any passing interest. Even the kitschy appeal that it once had, when I was still young enough to get excited when the contestant from my home state of New Jersey made the top 10, is a distant memory.
The very idea of rating women based on their looks should have been done away with long ago. It is not just outdated, it’s offensive. A holdover from an age since receded into the past — with good riddance.
After all, in 1921, when the Miss America pageant first started — and contestants wore a one-piece swimsuit — the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote had just been passed a year earlier. For decades, all the participant were white, a segregation that persisted until 1970 when the first black contestant made an appearance.
It took another 13 years before Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America. The first Asian-American title-holder, Angela Perez Baraquio, did not come until 2001. So far, almost 100 years into pageant history, no Latinas have been crowned.
For me, a Latina immigrant who grew up in New Jersey with aspirations to be a journalist, whose mother always emphasized the importance of education, independence and aiming to reach higher than those around me, the frippery of Miss America held no appeal, no relevance.