While watching the YouTube clip of Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, deliver a completely nonsensical, incoherent response to why 1/5 of Americans cannot find the United States on a map, I was overcome with two feelings that have been immortalized by 80s rap duo Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock: joy and pain.
I felt the pain first. Even though the Miss Teen USA pageant is hardly a Nielsen’s juggernaut, there are at least a few million Americans that tune in every year, not including the audience, the other contestants, and a panel full of D-list denizens whose acting credits as Bloody Corpse #2 on CSI qualifies them to pick America’s next teen sweetheart. I challenge anyone to stand on that stage and not be nervous with that many pairs of eyeballs watching you, waiting for you to screw up.
Though, Ms. Upton’s answer was less a screw up and more like projectile word vomit, sprinkled with a dash of poor education and topped off with a light dusting of delusion. She should have just kept it real. Kept the words simple. Certain people possess the natural (or learned) skill of elocution. Others do not. And that’s okay. Not everyone can be articulate, and those that are not, especially those whose lives revolve around pageantry, should know to work with what their mamas gave (or neglected to give) them.
Had she decided to work her down-home girl persona and said, “Y’all, I think that is such a shame. We need to get some more learnin’ up in y’all’s schoolhouses,” she would have a much better score from the judges and saved herself the immense embarrassment and YouTube infamy. But, instead, she tried to be someone else. She tried to affect an air of intelligence, as evident in her references to “the Iraq,” “South Africa,” and her flagrant use of the phrase “such as.” It was as if she watched old news reportage tapes of Christiane Amanpour but reenacted by Britney Spears after taking a Quaalude. Perhaps she thought just tossing out these non-sequiturs and sound bites from adult conversation would be enough to impress the crowd and judges. You can’t blame her for thinking it would work; hell, our president does it at every single press conference he attends. And he’s the president.
And when she completed her answer, you could hear the utter shock in Mario Lopez’s voice when saying, “Thank you, Miss South Carolina.” When you’ve made AC Slater silently condemn you as a fucking moron, then you know you need to shuffle around your priorities a bit. Perhaps fewer Cardio Striptease classes and more time in an actual classroom?
After watching the clip, my pain slowly subsided and was soon replaced by sinister, bitchy joy. Not that I have anything against Miss Upton. I’m sure she’s a nice young woman who was probably forced into this profession at the age of five by an obese mother with a permanent wave and a dream deferred. I was happy because Miss Teen South Carolina, though unwittingly, became an exemplar of sexist culture gone terribly, terribly awry.
The concept of beauty pageants is horrifying in and of itself, a backward, spray-tanned, Aquanet idea of what makes a woman successful and worthy of adoration. According to the Miss Teen USA pageant and the rest of its ilk, a woman needs to look good in a dress, look good in a bathing suit, walk in heels, smile wide, perform a choreographed dance routine, and answer a question in order to be placed on a pedestal high above her fellow females. I think they may have even eliminated the talent portion of some of these pageants, meaning you don’t even have to be able to tap dance or twirl a baton anymore in order to win a crown. You just have to be hot and form sentences, at the very most two or three full phrases: 1) “I’m ________ and I’m from the great state of _________!” and 2) “If I could change the world, I’d adopt every baby alive so that they’d all be American because this is the greatest country on earth! I support our troops!” Add that to a big rack and even bigger hair, and bam: crown and title.
And this is what we teach our young women. We teach them that if you’re pretty and smile a lot, you’ll have the world at your fingertips. You don’t need to contribute significantly to the workforce, you don’t have to be smart, and you needn’t be original, provocative, or groundbreaking in any way. It’s like a training facility for future trophy wives. These contestants field banal questions from judges whilst smiling in a bedazzled evening gown, just as they will in five years when their first husbands introduce them to their dirty old man business colleagues at a cocktail party.
And just as Miss Teen South Carolina should have kept it real, pageants should as well. PR teams shouldn’t try to spin pageants into celebrations of intelligence, poise, ambition, and scholarship. The last time I checked, the women finalists for Fulbright scholarships were not asked to strut in bikinis and 3-inch heels for the judging committee. But who knows? I was never eligible to become a Fulbright scholar; perhaps their criteria do involve a swimwear component of some sort and I’ve just been misinformed. Though, I did hear somewhere that Rhodes scholars have to perform flawless “jazz hands” before they can even step foot onto Oxford’s campus. And for good reason.
Pageants are contests based on looks and likeability, both relying on extremely standard expectations of aesthetics and personality. And if they billed themselves as that, I think they’d find themselves less frequently being the butt of jokes in this nation. And if they decided to distinguish themselves from other more healthy forms of competition amongst women (academic, artistic, entrepreneurial, et cetera), then maybe more young females would be aware that there are other means of excelling in our society, many of which do not require parading around like a bronzed show poodle.
So my glee doesn’t come from Ms. Upton’s humiliation, but rather from the fact that so many people watched her YouTube clip and afterwards, shook their heads in disbelief (when they weren’t crying from laughter or cringing with embarrassment). This gives me hope that people realize how pertinent the brain is, and then even a cute, fit blonde needs a little something going on upstairs.
I don’t worry about Ms. Upton. She’ll still have men lining up around the block with marriage proposals and an eagerness to impregnate her. She may even have a lucrative career as a local anchorwoman or as one of the entertainment correspondents on the TV Guide Channel. More importantly, she should proud that she has compromised a bit of her dignity in order to open the eyes of this country, and quite possibly the world. She was the sacrificial lamb whose slaughtering may have just sparked a revolution, mobilizing young, motivated women of substance to make their voices heard. Bless her heart, bless her stupidity, and God bless America.
I felt the pain first. Even though the Miss Teen USA pageant is hardly a Nielsen’s juggernaut, there are at least a few million Americans that tune in every year, not including the audience, the other contestants, and a panel full of D-list denizens whose acting credits as Bloody Corpse #2 on CSI qualifies them to pick America’s next teen sweetheart. I challenge anyone to stand on that stage and not be nervous with that many pairs of eyeballs watching you, waiting for you to screw up.
Though, Ms. Upton’s answer was less a screw up and more like projectile word vomit, sprinkled with a dash of poor education and topped off with a light dusting of delusion. She should have just kept it real. Kept the words simple. Certain people possess the natural (or learned) skill of elocution. Others do not. And that’s okay. Not everyone can be articulate, and those that are not, especially those whose lives revolve around pageantry, should know to work with what their mamas gave (or neglected to give) them.
Had she decided to work her down-home girl persona and said, “Y’all, I think that is such a shame. We need to get some more learnin’ up in y’all’s schoolhouses,” she would have a much better score from the judges and saved herself the immense embarrassment and YouTube infamy. But, instead, she tried to be someone else. She tried to affect an air of intelligence, as evident in her references to “the Iraq,” “South Africa,” and her flagrant use of the phrase “such as.” It was as if she watched old news reportage tapes of Christiane Amanpour but reenacted by Britney Spears after taking a Quaalude. Perhaps she thought just tossing out these non-sequiturs and sound bites from adult conversation would be enough to impress the crowd and judges. You can’t blame her for thinking it would work; hell, our president does it at every single press conference he attends. And he’s the president.
And when she completed her answer, you could hear the utter shock in Mario Lopez’s voice when saying, “Thank you, Miss South Carolina.” When you’ve made AC Slater silently condemn you as a fucking moron, then you know you need to shuffle around your priorities a bit. Perhaps fewer Cardio Striptease classes and more time in an actual classroom?
After watching the clip, my pain slowly subsided and was soon replaced by sinister, bitchy joy. Not that I have anything against Miss Upton. I’m sure she’s a nice young woman who was probably forced into this profession at the age of five by an obese mother with a permanent wave and a dream deferred. I was happy because Miss Teen South Carolina, though unwittingly, became an exemplar of sexist culture gone terribly, terribly awry.
The concept of beauty pageants is horrifying in and of itself, a backward, spray-tanned, Aquanet idea of what makes a woman successful and worthy of adoration. According to the Miss Teen USA pageant and the rest of its ilk, a woman needs to look good in a dress, look good in a bathing suit, walk in heels, smile wide, perform a choreographed dance routine, and answer a question in order to be placed on a pedestal high above her fellow females. I think they may have even eliminated the talent portion of some of these pageants, meaning you don’t even have to be able to tap dance or twirl a baton anymore in order to win a crown. You just have to be hot and form sentences, at the very most two or three full phrases: 1) “I’m ________ and I’m from the great state of _________!” and 2) “If I could change the world, I’d adopt every baby alive so that they’d all be American because this is the greatest country on earth! I support our troops!” Add that to a big rack and even bigger hair, and bam: crown and title.
And this is what we teach our young women. We teach them that if you’re pretty and smile a lot, you’ll have the world at your fingertips. You don’t need to contribute significantly to the workforce, you don’t have to be smart, and you needn’t be original, provocative, or groundbreaking in any way. It’s like a training facility for future trophy wives. These contestants field banal questions from judges whilst smiling in a bedazzled evening gown, just as they will in five years when their first husbands introduce them to their dirty old man business colleagues at a cocktail party.
And just as Miss Teen South Carolina should have kept it real, pageants should as well. PR teams shouldn’t try to spin pageants into celebrations of intelligence, poise, ambition, and scholarship. The last time I checked, the women finalists for Fulbright scholarships were not asked to strut in bikinis and 3-inch heels for the judging committee. But who knows? I was never eligible to become a Fulbright scholar; perhaps their criteria do involve a swimwear component of some sort and I’ve just been misinformed. Though, I did hear somewhere that Rhodes scholars have to perform flawless “jazz hands” before they can even step foot onto Oxford’s campus. And for good reason.
Pageants are contests based on looks and likeability, both relying on extremely standard expectations of aesthetics and personality. And if they billed themselves as that, I think they’d find themselves less frequently being the butt of jokes in this nation. And if they decided to distinguish themselves from other more healthy forms of competition amongst women (academic, artistic, entrepreneurial, et cetera), then maybe more young females would be aware that there are other means of excelling in our society, many of which do not require parading around like a bronzed show poodle.
So my glee doesn’t come from Ms. Upton’s humiliation, but rather from the fact that so many people watched her YouTube clip and afterwards, shook their heads in disbelief (when they weren’t crying from laughter or cringing with embarrassment). This gives me hope that people realize how pertinent the brain is, and then even a cute, fit blonde needs a little something going on upstairs.
I don’t worry about Ms. Upton. She’ll still have men lining up around the block with marriage proposals and an eagerness to impregnate her. She may even have a lucrative career as a local anchorwoman or as one of the entertainment correspondents on the TV Guide Channel. More importantly, she should proud that she has compromised a bit of her dignity in order to open the eyes of this country, and quite possibly the world. She was the sacrificial lamb whose slaughtering may have just sparked a revolution, mobilizing young, motivated women of substance to make their voices heard. Bless her heart, bless her stupidity, and God bless America.
Posted by: Sylvie - inzino staff
No comments:
Post a Comment