![]() The pageant isn’t a state-sponsored ritual, but its winners are invited to meet with Presidents and to address legislative committees. Participation has been declining for decades, but Miss America still commands attention, rivalling perhaps only major-league baseball in outsized nostalgia-based influence. As Margot Mifflin demonstrates in “ Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood” (Counterpoint), they have been woven into pageant culture from the start. Pageants, commingling ideology and entertainment, offered something extra-the French-braided forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. ![]() There are plenty of places to host clients, though. As Jeffrey Toobin reported in this magazine in 2018, Trump also used Miss Universe to drum up foreign business. Of all the things Trump could have invested in, why a beauty pageant? The proprietary access to young, beautiful women was surely an attraction. and its international offshoot, Miss Universe, were owned, in part, by Donald Trump. Miss America finally did away with its swimsuit competition in 2018, in the wake of a scandal that began with male executives at the organization referring to one former winner as a “blimp” and to other contestants as “cunts.” Apart from their formats, the big difference between the two pageants is that, until 2015, Miss U.S.A. Despite the schism, Miss America endured, with a reputation as the more demure of the two franchises. ![]() “I’m an opera singer, not a pinup,” Betbeze said.Ĭatalina went and started its own contest, Miss U.S.A., scrapping the talent competition and offering cash prizes instead of scholarships. But she won, and, newly crowned, refused to sign a contract that would have required her to tour the country in swimsuits made by Catalina, one of the pageant’s sponsors. She returned to her dressing room to find the words “Hairy sits here,” a reference to her thick eyebrows, scrawled in lipstick on the makeup mirror. In 1950, Yolande Betbeze, a convent-educated coloratura soprano from Mobile, Alabama, entered the Miss America contest and performed an aria from “Rigoletto” as her talent. As annual tournaments of unmarried, childless women in their late teens and twenties, the two events have much in common. To the long-standing annoyance of people involved with the Miss America contest, which bills itself as “first, and foremost, a scholarship program,” the general public often confuses it with Miss U.S.A., which freely admits to being a beauty pageant. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. ![]()
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