After nearly a century of pageants, the Miss America organization took a bold and controversial step on Tuesday, announcing that its national televised pageant would no longer feature a swimsuit competition. Coming in the wake of scandal around the terrible behavior of the organization’s former leadership, and a subsequent shakeup that elevated women like former Fox News host (and former Miss America) Gretchen Carlson to leadership, the change has surprised many.
Many conservatives I admire greatly have bemoaned the shift as capitulation to the feminist Left. Ben Shapiro of Daily Wire tweeted “Congratulations to the 2018 Miss America Winner, Madeleine Albright!”
I believe my brothers-in-arms are mistaken to decry this change. You don’t have to be a leftist women’s studies professor to think there’s something bizarre about asking young women to glue on a bathing suit bottom in order to effectively demonstrate confidence and poise and win scholarship money.
Yes, it is undoubtedly true that this shift comes amid #MeToo and broad changes in what women expect in the workplace, how they expect to be treated in public life, and so on. But to view this as a win for the Left, and therefore as an inherently bad development, misses how the Miss America pageant had already, over many decades, largely evolved away from being a “beauty pageant” in the first place — and at every stage, that evolution has been a good thing.
The Miss America pageant began nearly a hundred years ago, with the crowning of a 16-year-old girl and a new title that was simpler than the previously-bestowed “Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America.” It has been the subject of feminist protest for decades, and over the years, the pageant has gradually shifted its emphasis; nearly thirty years ago, the concept of a “platform” was introduced, where participants were expected to have a cause for which they were fighting. If you’re a casual observer, it would be easy to think that Miss America was still mostly a swimsuit contest until today, but even before this announcement a contestants’ score was based far less on looks and more on her talent and on her ability to field questions from a group of judges a la a White House press secretary.
If you badly want to see women judged on their appearance in a bikini, the market still has options available for you. Some pageants, like Miss Universe, have never really pretended to be more than a contest of who is more beautiful, and that’s their prerogative. There is nothing wrong with wanting to look and feel beautiful, and there is no shortage of women signing up to compete for those titles. And speaking of prerogatives, what a woman wants to wear and how she chooses to present herself to the world should be entirely up to her.
But Miss America was trying to have it both ways, calling itself a “scholarship pageant” in recent years while still featuring the swimsuit spectacle. (Notably, the organization came under fire from John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” for giving too few scholarship dollars away.) If you’re going to call yourself a scholarship pageant, rather than a beauty pageant, you may as well judge on criteria that seem remotely connected to, well, scholarship. To the extent that fitness, poise, and confidence are valuable and should be celebrated — and they should be! — there are myriad ways to do so that do not require an abdominal contour spray tan.
All of which brings us back to the notion that somehow, dropping the swimsuit portion is a concession to a liberal Left agenda, rather than a continued re-orienting of an institution around more an obviously more laudable mission. Ross Douthat often writes of an “alliance of feminists and religious conservatives” that has, at times, fought together against entertainment that exploits women. A conservative movement that holds modesty as a virtue ought to be glad that young women will no longer be asked by a major American institution to strip down to get their college paid for.
Will this change truly re-invigorate the Miss America Organization itself? It’s entirely possible that it won’t. Any time an institution tries to evolve to adapt to the times, there’s a chance that they’ll alienate “their base” without winning over any new fans. (See also: political parties, religious institutions.) Ratings suggest people like to watch beautiful people on their television. What Miss America has done in no way guarantees more viewers next year, more women signing up to compete, or greater relevance in American culture. That makes the decision to change all the more bold and praiseworthy.
