From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
Triumph of the Fembots
Beauty queens are out. The Pussycat Dolls are in.
In Hollywood tonight, a bevy of bouncing bodacious beauties will swish their way across the stage of the Kodak Theatre in the culminating and decisive event of the 56th annual Miss USA pageant. The NBC-televised extravaganza, in which pretty girls will compete in "Swimsuit," "Evening Gown" and "Interview" categories, is to conclude with Miss USA 2006, Tara Connor, passing her sparkling tiara to whoever her lucky successor will be.
Miss Connor, as alert readers will remember, was dispatched to redemptive rehab by pageant co-owner Donald Trump after it emerged last year that she had been boozing it up in New York bars. Out from rehab she came, clean and remorseful, yet another second-act American proving F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong.
Cynics observed when Miss Connor was disgraced that her fall might be just the shot of viewer-attracting adrenaline that the Miss USA pageant needed. Ratings for beauty pageants generally have plunged in recent years, from as high as 20 million viewers in their heyday. In 2006, the Miss Universe pageant drew only nine million--though that's about how many saw the top-rated "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" the same week; and in ratings terms, it ain't nothing. Besides, in the early days, beauty pageants didn't have much competition. Now there are innumerable TV channels, many of them heaving with glistening, half-naked females--not to mention the distractions of the Internet.
Yet in some ways it's amazing that Miss USA has survived at all. Set beside, say, the tawny cleavages of the Victoria's Secret lingerie show, beauty pageants seem an almost touching relic of a time when it was rather daring for a girl to display her amenities in public. In primitive, pre-Lycra days, the sight of comely virgins prancing about onstage was in itself thought to be sufficiently exhilarating without them having to appear mostly undressed. You see them demurely posed in the old photographs, their plump and milky bodies looking embarrassingly retrograde by today's angular standards.
Almost as quaint is the frothing rage that feminists once displayed at these pageants for the pulchritudinous. In 1968, a women's lib group called New York Radical Women held a parodic Miss America contest outside the Atlantic City convention center where the real competition was taking place. As queen of their show, the radicals crowned a live sheep. They also collected a trash can full of "tools of female oppression" such as high heels, tweezers, curlers and brassieres. Protesters chanted: "Ain't she sweet, making profits off her meat."
The feminist establishment still holds a grudge against beauty contests, though you sense that it feels a little half-hearted about reciting the same old tired characterization of womanhood being squished by the patriarchy. On its Web site, for example, the National Organization for Women urges activists to stage "real women" beauty pageants in order to subvert the televised ones.
"Not only do pageants uphold certain beauty standards that are dangerous and offensive," NOW scolds. "They pit women against each other as enemies competing to achieve impossible perfection and win male approval."
Seeking male approval is, of course, a terrible thing for women. It seems to be worse than writhing around on television in a scarily muscular "sex-positive" fashion, however titillating such a spectacle may incidentally be for male viewers. How else to explain NOW's lack of interest in deploring, among other pop-culture horrors, "Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll"?
On this egregious program, televised by the new CW network, which should be ashamed of itself, nubile contestants thrust about and waggle their bottoms while they "work that pole" and sing along to lyrics such as, "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was raw like me?" The idea is for each girl to somehow stand out from the other contestants while simultaneously blending in, so as to win the ultimate prize of joining the actual L.A. burlesque pop group the Pussycat Dolls. Rehearsing their moves, the poor, stiletto-clad contestants are constantly belittled, their "passion" questioned. "If you don't get off that box on time, I'm going to sthtart sthcreaming!"" yelled an irate choreographer in this past week's episode. "Puuush!" cried another, as the girls desperately ground their hips in circles.
It will probably not surprise you to hear that the creators of this cat-housery want us to believe that getting pretty, young, scantily clad women to writhe for the camera is a way of empowering them. According to this line of reasoning, these gyrating fembots are a triumph of liberated femininity, using their sexuality on their own terms. Aren't they sweet? Making profits from their meat? In fact, the world of women parading for men's pleasure hasn't changed--except that now women have allowed themselves to be fooled into thinking that the less they wear and the more they "work it," the more independent and free-spirited they actually are.
Depravity dressed up as empowerment is fast becoming the cultural trope of our times. This past week, public disgust forced the removal of a series of gruesome billboard movie ads depicting a lovely blond woman being tortured. The CEO of the film company that made "Captivity" professed shock that the wrong images had been used in the ads. "This movie is certainly a horror movie and it's about abduction," he told the Hollywood Reporter, "but it's also about female empowerment."
All things considered, beauty pageants in which young ladies seek to distinguish themselves by their perky good looks, slim figures, clean and articulate demeanors, and blameless, charitable private lives--even if, as in the case of Tara Connor, they fall short of this ideal--probably should be seen as something wonderful and even innocent. They are a small televisual counterbalance for a popular culture that has become so confused that it cannot distinguish virtue from the oldest of professions.
Mrs. Gurdon writes about children's books for The Wall Street Journal.
