Saturday, January 12, 2013

Beauty Pageants Are No Good

Apparently they crowned a new Miss America. Which makes this a good time to mention how much beauty pageants creep me out.

These things seem to be tests of how well women can perform femininity, with men ranking them on their ability to do so. That is not in any way a legitimate measure of how awesome women are, and it's a distraction from the actual ways of being awesome. The sooner we're done with this nonsense, and the more we encourage admiration of the women who have made advances in socially beneficial fields like science, teaching, and public administration, the better off we'll be.

2 comments:

mccn said...

And, for other aspects of feminine performance, one always has the Hookies: http://www.thehookies.com/

Anonymous said...

You know how those beauty contests usually have a talent competition?

I've been waiting for one of the contestants to have a Ph.D. in a scientific field, and in the talent competition, she'd summarize some of her published research findings.

In an honest, un-rigged competition, she'd win the talent competition by such a huge margin that it would render moot the differences in the other competition categories.

The following year, several Ph.D. holders would enter the competition. And the year after that, the organizers would say the hell with it, and shut it down.

-ltc