The End of Miss America

Jennifer Weiner DEC. 22, 2017

Mallory Hagan, being crowned Miss America in 2013, was a subject of sexist emails from a pageant executive. Credit David Becker/Getty Images
During the summer nights in Provincetown, Mass., pedestrians and passers-by are treated to a show. As the sun sets, the queens come out. The heels are high; the hair is higher, the makeup expertly applied, turning the performers into amplified versions of Cher, or Barbie, or Lady Gaga, or creatures of their own invention.

They gamely pose for pictures with everyone from kids to straight couples from the suburbs to two-dad families pushing strollers.

The mood is exuberant and joyful. The traditional trappings of femininity are a pose, not a prison; a costume that you can slip in and out of, refashioning it until it suits you.

I thought about the queens of Provincetown, and the exuberance of their pageant, on Thursday. That’s when Yashar Ali of HuffPost broke the news that Sam Haskell, the chief executive of the Miss America Organization, wrote an email laughing along as Lewis Friedman, the televised pageant’s head writer, referred to former crown-holders in the crudest, most derogatory, term for a woman’s anatomy.

In this correspondence, the former Miss Americas are not winners. Not women. They’re not even people; not even bodies. Just body parts.

Then it got worse.

HuffPost also reported that when Mary Ann Mobley, a former Miss America, died in 2014, Mr. Haskell was part of an email chain with the heading “It Should Have Been Kate Shindle.” Ms. Shindle, Miss America 1998, has been an outspoken critic of some of the pageant’s practices, as well as its decision to pay Mr. Haskell $500,000 when the organization was in debt.

Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News anchor who was Miss America 1989, was shut out of pageant broadcasts after she refused to publicly criticize Ms. Shindle. Mallory Hagan, who won the Miss America title in 2013, was subject to fat-shaming (an email chain joked that she was “preparing for her new career … as a blimp in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade”) and comments about her sex life.

In the #MeToo era, as a (highly conflicted) fan of the pageant, I’ve been bracing myself, waiting for this particular high-heeled shoe to drop. It’s not surprising that a contest with objectification baked into its DNA has spawned this kind of talk, and behavior, from the men in charge.

For most of its life, the Miss America Pageant has been an odd hybrid. Born in 1921 as a bathing-beauty competition with the goal of extending Atlantic City’s summer season, at first the pageant was, literally, about the use of women’s bodies to sell a product — or a place. Even after sections for talent and interviews were added, even after the swimsuit competition was renamed to recognize “lifestyle and fitness” in swimwear, even after the organization swapped prizes of fur coats and screen tests for scholarships, the pageant has struggled to reconcile its search for brains with its obsession with beauty.

Miss America has soldiered on, though, even as it went from being one of the highest-rated broadcasts on television in the 1960s to a target of feminist ire in the 1970s to a relic and a curiosity in the 2000s. ABC stopped airing the contest in 2005. The pageant moved from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, from broadcast network to basic cable. Meanwhile, reality TV was eating its lunch, tempting young women with a bevy of options to win plummier prizes than the organization could offer, while competing pageants promised smaller swimsuits, higher heels, and fewer pesky questions about how to bring about world peace.

A 2014 segment on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” detailed how the organization that billed itself as the “largest provider of scholarship assistance to young women in the United States” was, in fact, handing out only a sliver of the $45 million it claimed was available, which didn’t help the show’s fortunes. Miss A. was on life support.

Mr. Haskell was instrumental in turning things around. He got the pageant back on ABC, hosted by Chris Harrison, dispenser of roses on the network’s popular “Bachelor” franchise. Gingerly, Miss America began edging toward modernity.

In 2014, an Indian-American woman won the crown. The deposed Miss America Vanessa Williams got an on-air apology and was welcomed back into the fold. There have been winners with tattoos and piercings, and in 2016, the first contestant who identified as gay (hello, Miss Missouri!) Last year, the organization announced it plans to air the pageant on ABC through 2019.

Then came the bombshell HuffPost report. Ms. Carlson said she was “shocked and deeply saddened by the disgusting statements about women attributed to the leadership” of the Miss America Organization. On Friday, Kate Shindle wrote, “I almost don’t have the words to respond to Yashar Ali’s revelations about the current leadership of the Miss America Organization,” adding, “it makes me physically ill.”

Dick Clark Productions severed its relationships with the pageant. Mr. Friedman, the head writer, was fired, and the pageant announced that it was forming a committee and retaining independent legal counsel to investigate. By Friday afternoon, 49 former Miss Americas, including 87-year-old BeBe Shopp Waring, were pushing for more, calling on leadership to resign. Mr. Haskell was suspended on Friday.

It might not be enough. Nothing might be able to remove the stain of so much hateful, crude, sexist talk. It might be that we’ve seen our last weeping, rhinestone-crowned Miss A. making her way down the Atlantic City walkway.

So what’s a pageant fan to do?

Maybe Mr. Haskell’s emails hastened the process of a slow and natural death, an extinction by attrition, where eventually the pageant would ditch the swimsuits (as Miss Teen USA did in 2016), acknowledge that nobody, much less a 19-year-old college student, wears evenings gowns and admit — if we’re all being honest — that drag queens are doing this better.

Maybe it’s time to look to places like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” for traditional femininity played as spectacle. There’s still joy to be found in the transformation and performance, in watching someone with hair teased high and waist cinched tight competing for a prize. And if that joy comes from RuPaul’s bevy of beauties and not the Atlantic City boardwalk?

We’re surviving the presidency of a former pageant owner who called one of his beauty queens “Miss Piggy” when she gained weight after her win. Certainly we’ll survive that, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/opinion/miss-america-pageant-haskell-email.html