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09/09/2017
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By Destiny Morgan Posted on 6 days ago18 min read0 0 30
Posted on September 8, 2017 at 10:30 AM
ATLANTIC CITY — The lights had barely dimmed on the 2017 Miss America pageant at Boardwalk Hall last September when Betty Cantrell, Miss America 2016, made a major announcement on Instagram. The former Miss Georgia and her permasmile had just presented the cheery, blond Savvy Shields of Arkansas with the Miss America sash and crown, but this piece of news was not about passing the baton.
For Cantrell, handing over the title meant she could at long last share her secret.
“And now finally I can say my fiance!” she captioned a photo that showed off her new diamond and future husband. Owing to restrictions that come with the job, Cantrell had only seen her boyfriend “six or seven times” during the course of her Miss America year, she tells NJ Advance Media.
“I really wasn’t supposed to be engaged as Miss America,” says Cantrell, 22. “She’s supposed to be America’s sweetheart,” she says of Miss America. “She’s supposed to remain single. … They don’t want people to think that you’re … taken.”
As sure as pumpkin spice finds its way back to the American diet and the nation heralds the return of football, the pageant, famous for its bathing suits, offbeat talents and lightning-quick current events questions, arrives on ABC Sunday to anoint another young woman Miss America. Though attempts have been made to reinvigorate the pageant for younger audiences, no amount of rebranding can paper over Miss America’s dubious history of “championing” women, critics say.
The pageant’s true game? Tenuously grasping a vintage feminine archetype. Despite all of its talk about women’s empowerment, scholarships, STEM education and six-figure salaries, Miss America is ultimately living in the past.
Founded in 1921 as a spectacle to keep people on the boardwalk past Labor Day, Miss America remains an American antique, latched to a vintage rendering of the “ideal” woman. “There she is, Miss America,” goes the old song, crooned for years by pageant host Bert Parks. “There she is, your ideal.”
AND NOW FINALLY I CAN SAY MY FIANCE! TO THE MAN WHO LET ME BE MISS AMERICA FOR A YEAR, TO THE MAN WHO IS MOVING TO NASHVILLE WITH ME TO HELP ME ACHIEVE MY DREAMS AS A COUNTRY MUSIC SINGER, TO THE MAN WHO SO SELFLESSLY LETS ME SHINE, TO THE MAN WHO NEVER GAVE UP ON ME…TO THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. FOREVER AND ALWAYS, YOUR DREAMS ARE MY DREAMS. I LOVE YOU SPINNY. #TONEWDREAMS #TRUELOVE #FIANCE[?] #ENGAGED #FINALLY
A POST SHARED BY BETTY CANTRELL (@BETTYCANTRELLMUSIC) ON SEP 11, 2016 AT 9:01PM PDT
Though the pageant fashions itself as a friend to women pursuing college degrees — a “competition,” not a “beauty pageant” — Miss America persists in trying to manage the lovelives of its titleholders. When a woman wins the pageant, staff determine if she has a boyfriend, then advise her on how to proceed, especially in public, Cantrell says.
“They make it very clear that you’re not to be seen with him,” she says, currently tending to her budding country music career in Nashville with her fiance, Spencer Maxwell, 25, a former member of a police SWAT team (his tattoos initially worried pageant staff), who she met on Tinder before she won her state pageant. For several weeks after she got engaged in August of 2016, Cantrell would wear her ring in the privacy of her hotel room — another place Maxwell was not welcome — and take it off for public appearances.
Chelsea Mineur, a spokeswoman for the Atlantic City-based Miss America Organization, says that there are no official rules regarding Miss America’s relationship with a boyfriend or her dating life, but that “engagements should be announced after her reign.” Already engaged women, however, need not apply.
Sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman, a Brown University professor and judge at the Miss America’s Outstanding Teen pageant this past July, points out that engagement protocol has varied over the years. Jennifer Berry, Miss America 2006, announced her engagement at the pageant, as did Katie Stam, Miss America 2009. So in the era of the new, improved “Wonder Woman,” is another slice of Americana, Miss America herself, actually regressing?
“It’s a little bit surprising that that needs to be suppressed,” says Levey Friedman, whose mother, Pamela Eldred, was Miss America 1970.
Ann Marie Nicolosi, a history professor specializing in women’s and gender studies at The College of New Jersey, says such restrictions speak to the heart of why Miss America never really delivers on its claims of “empowering young women everywhere.”
Contestants walk the stage in the swimsuit portion of the 2017 Miss America preliminary competition at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. (Tim Hawk | For NJ.com)
“The pageant, although it is trying to be hip and relevant, is still selling this virginal ideal,” she says. “It’s almost the ultimate expression of the Madonna-whore complex.” That’s an association with some history. Nearly 50 years ago, before unfurling a women’s liberation banner at the 1969 pageant, bra- and girdle-trashing feminist protesters labeled the institution of Miss America “The Unbeatable Madonna-Whore Combination” (they also called her “The Degrading-Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol”).
Some say the pageant, despite its long-waning relevance, has made strides to keep up with the times. In 2016, Miss America saw its first openly gay contestant in Miss Missouri, Erin O’Flaherty. Levey Friedman calls sexuality the “new frontier” of the pageant, though she’s not sure Miss America is ready for a transgender contestant.
Contestants in the 2018 pageant will face an additional round of questioning this week that will focus on evaluating personality, say pageant organizers. Meanwhile, the swimsuit competition, arguably the most infamous part of the pageant, is still in effect, though long decried as a vestigial part of the event, reminiscent of a time when contestants’ bust, hip and waist measurements were public information. To that end, the swimsuit portion was rebranded in recent years as “Lifestyle and Fitness in Swimsuit,” a way for contestants to show off their “body confidence” and hard work in the gym.
Personal trainer and CrossFit enthusiast Chelsea Dubczak, 23, Miss Iowa, made “Ladies Who Lift: Strengthening Mind and Body” her pageant platform. Miss Oregon, Harley Emery, 20, calls herself a feminist and says she is making a concerted effort to evoke fitness with her choice of swimsuit, which has a “sports bra” look. Her hope is that the pageant eventually moves away from bikinis.
Sam Haskell, Miss America CEO, has said that even though another pageant, Miss Teen USA, moved last year to eliminate swimsuit struts (Miss USA’s continue unabated) in favor of athletic wear, he doesn’t think Miss America will ever surrender its bathing suit ritual.
No matter, the Miss America faithful say, if a student can bag money for school — up to $50,000, if she wins. As advertised, Miss America is, as John Oliver was dismayed to report in 2014, the largest provider of scholarships for women (the pageant had nonetheless hugely inflated its contributions). Each year, contestants shrug off “pageant girl” stereotypes and tell us that Miss America is paying their way through college.
“You can say it’s about scholarship money, but it’s also about this ideal about what the ideal American young woman is,” Nicolosi says. Even as Miss America became more diverse over the latter half of its 96 years — in 1940, the pageant dropped a rule that held contestants must be white, though decades would pass before the first black contestant — a physical rubric has always been part of the equation.
“She has to be whatever the current beauty ideal is,” Nicolosi says. “She has to be the ultimate object of desire.” The 2016 swimsuit competition was set to the Meghan Trainor song “Me Too.” The chorus: “If I was you, I’d wanna be me, too.” (If you, too, wouldn’t mind applying some butt glue.) Miss America is the face (and body) of a brand, Nicolosi says.
Preliminary swimsuit competition: Miss America 2017
Aspiring doctors, lawyers, scientists and working nurses have happily competed in the modern iteration of Miss America, espousing a commitment to volunteerism. The pageant usually manages to gain traction on Twitter, but the show nonetheless struggles with ratings as its core audience goes the way of petticoats and golden mermaid trophies.
In 2015, the pageant held its own in the ratings as Miss America’s CEO issued an onstage apology to Vanessa Williams, who had been asked to resign as Miss America in 1984 after Penthouse published her nude photos. (The next year, the pageant was losing its audience once again.)
But the big Miss America scandal of 1999 had nothing to do with nude photos.
Robert Beck, then the pageant CEO, had introduced a measure to repeal bans on women who had gotten divorced or had abortions, saying the prohibitions could be challenged under state anti-discrimination law. The pageant’s board of directors passed the measure. But when state pageant organizations objected and took legal action — and the reigning Miss America, Nicole Johnson, panned the move –the Miss America Organization fired Beck and reinstated the rules.
“They were reluctant to do anything controversial,” recalls Steven Perskie, a former state lawmaker instrumental in the legalization of casino gambling who served as the pageant’s attorney. This amounted to a reinforcement of the “American maiden” trope, Nicolosi says.
“As soon as she transgresses and exerts her own sexual choices, whether it’s through abortion or through marriage, then she no longer fits that ideal,” Nicolosi says.
Mineur, the Miss America spokeswoman, confirms that divorced women, like engaged women, are still prohibited from competing.
And women who have had abortions?
“We do not ask.”
Savvy Shields being crowned as Miss America 2017
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