My earliest memory of the Miss America pageant was watching it on a black-and-white TV the size of a washing machine with a screen the size of an Etch a Sketch. I was 11 years old, and, like all 11-year-old boys, I was a burgeoning sex maniac, and yet the one thing I remember clearly is that the swimsuits had all the raw steaminess of an adult diaper.
Back in the 1960s there were plenty of sexy swimsuits. There were even topless swimsuits introduced in 1962. But for some reason the swimsuits in the contest were dowdy one-piece affairs, and not even good dowdy one-piece affairs. They actually had butt sleeves that came down over the top of the thighs. They resembled 1890s beachwear, the kind worn by women with “permanent waves,” holding parasols.
Anyway, as you can guess, I am writing about the recent decision by the Miss America pageant to eliminate the swimsuit competition, a decision which, as a woke, New Age feminist man, I am required to politely applaud with prim little pat-pat noises, even though I actually think it is immeasurably stupid. Sure, the swimsuit competition is sexist and retrograde and demeaning, but that is the whole point of the Miss America pageant, and always has been, and if you have any doubt about that, consider the weird persistence of “Miss,” and the requirement that the contestants be unmarried, un-divorced and, presumably, you know, unsullied.
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But mostly, the greatest fiction is that it has always been primarily a competition about talent and achievement.
The world already has competitions for talent and achievement, irrespective of how one’s tuchus looks in a bikini. These competitions have names like “the Nobel Prizes” and “American Idol,” and the standards are way higher. Unlike Miss America, no one has ever competed for the Nobels in the category of “speed painting,” “walking on glass” or “dancing on roller skates.”
The point is, the Miss America pageant has always been kitschy and ridiculous, and no one watched it for the singing and dancing.
(Or for the sequined evening gown competition, filled with contestants Dave Barry once described as women who look like they have been “swallowed up to [their] bosom by a giant tropical fish”; or for the accompanying question-and-answer sessions, which tend to be as painful to watch as when Alex Trebek does those awkward Q&A segments with the contestants on “Jeopardy!” “Carla, I understand you once ate ice cream with a melon baller. ...”)
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No, Miss America was all about the swimsuit competition, and not because it was hot, but because it perfectly embodied the defining stupidity of the pageant, particularly the entire idea that it makes sense for ladies to wear swimsuits with spike heels, a convention that, to my knowledge, exists only in beauty pageants and possibly some luxury car showrooms.
Share this articleShareI never attended a Miss America pageant but do have a story about one. In 1976, I was working at a small newspaper in Albany, N.Y. That year, Miss America was a local woman, so I decided it would be a good idea to ask her out on a date, for a story. Since I was both married and ugly, this job went to my good friend Tim, another reporter at the paper, who resembled Robert Redford. Tim approached Miss America at some public event, made his proposal. She smiled and wrote something on a piece of paper. It was a contact, and a phone number.
The next day Tim came to me, chagrined. She had stiffed him. He had called the number, and asked for the contact, and there was no such person! He showed me the paper.
“There is no “Miss Ann Paget,” he said. He was going to write a story about being stiffed by Miss America.
“Uh, she wrote ‘Miss Am. Pageant,’” I said.
He called back and got the date. It went well. They didn’t go swimming.
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