Unveiling Pageantry: The Evolution, Impact, and Modern Transformation of Beauty Pageants
Nov 06, 2023Season 4Episode 10
S.J. Mendelson
Are beauty pageants a relic of the past or are they evolving to keep pace with societal changes? Join us as we take a deep dive into a riveting discussion about this seemingly fading phenomenon with our special guest, Patt Morrison. Patt, with her rich personal history in pageantry, opens up about the impact it had on her life. Together, we explore the evolution and the decline of traditional beauty pageants in America, and the emergence of new forms of pageantry. From the original mission of boosting post-Labor Day business to the more modern focus on areas such as climate change, it's a conversation that uncovers the many facets of pageantry you might not have considered.
Yet, pageantry isn't just about beauty and business. It's about women, scholarships, and the media too. We explore the portrayal of pageants in local newspapers and how the women's movement has influenced their relevance today. Most strikingly, we delve into the significant role these pageants play in providing scholarships to young women. As we unravel the threads of pageantry's history and its transition into entertainment mediums like 'The Bachelor' and 'RuPaul's Drag Race', we remember the importance of staying true to oneself. To wrap up, we remind you that no matter the societal norms or the glittering stages, you're always loved for being you. So, tune in for this eye-opening episode that promises to reveal a side of beauty pageants you've never seen before.
Are beauty pageants a relic of the past or are they evolving to keep pace with societal changes? Join us as we take a deep dive into a riveting discussion about this seemingly fading phenomenon with our special guest, Patt Morrison. Patt, with her rich personal history in pageantry, opens up about the impact it had on her life. Together, we explore the evolution and the decline of traditional beauty pageants in America, and the emergence of new forms of pageantry. From the original mission of boosting post-Labor Day business to the more modern focus on areas such as climate change, it's a conversation that uncovers the many facets of pageantry you might not have considered.
Yet, pageantry isn't just about beauty and business. It's about women, scholarships, and the media too. We explore the portrayal of pageants in local newspapers and how the women's movement has influenced their relevance today. Most strikingly, we delve into the significant role these pageants play in providing scholarships to young women. As we unravel the threads of pageantry's history and its transition into entertainment mediums like 'The Bachelor' and 'RuPaul's Drag Race', we remember the importance of staying true to oneself. To wrap up, we remind you that no matter the societal norms or the glittering stages, you're always loved for being you. So, tune in for this eye-opening episode that promises to reveal a side of beauty pageants you've never seen before.
Morning bitches and dolls. If no one told you they love you, then I love you because you are you. Who else are you going to be but yourself? Oh my God, what a great weekend. Worked on Bubbie's no Best. That was very exciting with the other two bubs Amazing, amazing. I can't wait for you all to watch the show on JLTV. But now I'm going to read an article which you know.
Speaker 1:
I always love to read the articles that really strike me, hit me in the head or the heart, and this is from the incredible Pat Morrison. Look her up if you don't know who she is. She's amazing. This is what she wrote about, which I because I'm going to tell you something after I finish this article. We'll talk about it when we talk. Who is that? Everybody's favorite comedian, joan Rivers. The best Beauty pageants are past their heyday. There she isn't.
Speaker 1:
When was the last time you watched a crown and sash pageant or even read any news about a miss so and so beauty queen? The last I remember was in the movies Miss Congeniality. And Holly Hunt is yearning to be Miss Firecracker in her small Southern hometown. But a live competition for queens of places and queens of industries, certainly none as magnificently named as Yelville, miss Turkey Trot, miss Drumsticks Paget, miss Pennsylvania's by two minutes cold queen, and not the recent crowning of queen Nicotina, the 87th in Southern Maryland's historic tobacco country. The Cold War gave us Miss Adam Baum top that commies. She was photographed in 1957 after winning her title in Las Vegas that glow in the desert city, within the sight of the even more incandescent nuclear testing grounds. You remember that if you're my age? Okay, she is posting exuberantly in her arms, upflung, with a cloud of blonde air affixed to her swimsuit, a cottony, torso sized mushroom cloud. Let's talk about the film afterwards in which so many movie stars and directors died of cancer when they filmed it in the desert.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I don't know how Brooke Robin came to be chosen to be national uranium queen in 56, but her photo and fishnots, stockings and high heels posing with pick and shovel made the papers all over the country. Her reign must have had a half life of 4.5 billion years and I only and only from Life Magazine do I know that on June, a June day in 1951, right here on Sunset Boulevard, niko Wanga, on the five acres of the Muller Brothers full service, gas repair, tires, oldsmobile sales empire, a PR stunt arrayed beauty queens across the premises, among them Miss New Car Department, miss Polish Job and, of course, miss Lube Rack. Yet like most veteran reporters, I was once assigned to cover a California Dairy Princess pageant where I was told that the title is Princess because there is only one queen in the dairy business and that is the cow. I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that over the decades corporate America has crowned Miss Clink Beach, miss Avocado, miss Radial Tires, miss Dry Roasted Peanuts, miss Number Two Pencil and Miss Brannock Device. So what's become of those glamour fest? Start at the top with the wanting waning of Miss America's profile, from a 1921 Atlantic City beauty review to gin up businesses after Labor Day to its glory days to today. This coronation of the model. American Girl was once America's highest rated TV show, carried live in prime time to tens of millions on a major network 85 million in 1960.
Speaker 1:
The 2023 contest was viewable on a pay to watch streaming site. For years Ms A's image was preserved, so unsullied by a real world controversy that in the mid-1960s, as Frank Dieford wrote in his book, there she Is. When an interviewer brought up race, the number one national topic of the moment, a pageant official walked the new queen right out of the room. A half century or so later, in 2017, finalists didn't dither or demure in answering judges' questions about the Paris Climate Accords, the Charlotteville Neo-Nazi rally and Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia. 2023's Ms A Grace Stank is a nuclear engineer student who's been speaking at international conferences and promoting nuclear energy as a climate chain solution and doing it in comfy flat sandals too.
Speaker 1:
For pageants less August than Ms A, I saw in pageantry magazine ever more elaborate and overlapping titles Universal, ms USA American, ms Ms Earth USA, committed to the environment, mental projects and climate leadership training, ms All-Star United States, ms Senior USA and Ms American Co-Ed. Didn't that word go out with poodle skirts? I'm just saying here we still have Mrs Downey and Elope Valley Tustin, at least a dozen or so in LA and Orange County, most of them at pains to play down in the old hubba-hubba stuff. And instead of affirming their missions of community and service, santa Clarita calls its crown competition the Ms Santa Clarita Valley USA leadership program. If you're not reading about these, even in your own neighborhood, it's partly because the hometown newspapers that used to discover them have been disappearing, as have some of the pageants themselves.
Speaker 1:
The women's movement has afforded women more and richer paths for education and careers than via swimsuits and sequins. The Miss America tragic brag that it was the single biggest source of scholarship money for women in the United States always gulped me to the gill. Exactly, pat, in 1997, in these pages, I let fly. Take a moment to get your mind around that. The richest part of dough available to America's young women to educate themselves to become doctors, ceos, professors, public officials, lawyers, leaders of nation and families and you have to parade around in a bathing suit on national TV to get it. Imagine telling a young man he could win a full ride to Pomona or Cornell if he'd sashay down a runway with 49 other young men, all dressed like Tom Cruise in risky business. I don't know too many people who would mind that. In fact, I'd like to see Tom Cruise again like that, wouldn't you?
Speaker 1:
Miss America did away with the swimsuit competition in 2018 and changed its mission from pageant to competition. Its contestants are now delegates and instead of swimsuits they wear sparkly athletic outfits. In the health and fitness event, the Bikini and Stiletto parades of yore and the Patchen's practice of sharing contestants' measurements which didn't end until 1986, wreaked of skin mag salaciousness, not the health that organizers supposedly valued. Mallory Hagan, miss America 2013,. Described for A&Es recent series Secrets of Miss America what contestants did to look swimmable. I saw laxatives, caffeine pills, diet pills, things that probably shouldn't be sold on a market. I saw prescription drug abuse you name it. I've not had water for 24 hours ahead of a swimsuit competition, so I would dehydrate myself to the point. You could not. You could see my muscles, and I'm not the only one. Other pageants that follow suit in ditching the suit. For example, next month, miss Southern California and Miss Long Beach Contenders will compete without having to wear either long evening gowns or swimsuits, and the organizers welcome unusual hairstyles, colors, piercings, eyewear and tattoos. Excuse, my frog in my Troy. I have a frog in Detroit and I won't talky or can talky. That's an old Brooklyn joke. Beyond the disappearing local newspapers and women's vaster choices, I couldn't hazard a guess about the fate of pageants, so I bestow.
Speaker 1:
We saw Hillary Levy Friedman's insight. She's a sociologist who comes by her knowledge via degrees earned from Harvard, princeton and Cambridge and from personal touchstones. Her mother was Miss America 1970. And Friedman did a three year turn as president of Rhode Island's national organization for women chapter. Her recent book is here. She is the complicated reign of the beauty pageant in America. I did have this bit right, she told me. Pageants all around and just not as popular. They've been dwindling away as the pace of pop culture goes a lot quicker. These days Pageants sponsored by local businesses and industries, like some of those businesses themselves, have disappeared from American culture and commerce and around the country. Many pageants were run by organizations like the, the JCs, and, as some service groups have seen chapters and membership disappear. She said you see a parallel decline in the pageants they sponsored.
Speaker 1:
Friedman was traveling in the West over the summer and went to a rodeo or rodeo in Jackson, wyoming. It's a big tradition in the rodeo to have pageants and pageant queens and it's tied into horses. But she read in the local paper that there was only candidate for the rodeo or rodeo queen title. That woman won it anyway and had earned it. A big write up in the paper gave full marks for her achievements and her goals.
Speaker 1:
I'd say the rise of reality TV has impacted many things In particular things like the Miss America pageant. Friedman says the pageant is no longer the only game in town and even Miss America is no longer the only way, the only way. Carrie Underwood tried to be Miss Oklahoma and didn't win. But she won American Idol. Of course she did. I predicted her to win. She was great and is great and for half a century, the groundbreaking title nine Friedman pointed out has delivered more more than 20,000 women in sports and, I would venture to say, has given women healthier and more varied notions of what women's bodies should look like.
Speaker 1:
Don't expect the pageant world to take its tiara and slink, quietly owned with yoga bands, freedom says. The South in particular is still the land of pageants. There's always going to be an audience, I think pageantry just takes different shapes. The bachelor in some senses is a reincarnation of what Miss America used to be. Rupaul's Drag Race Show has a lot of elements of the pageant in it. Thank you, pat Morrison.
Speaker 1:
And let me tell you TikTok bubby's experience with pageants. I was in Miss Teenager, miss American Teenager, at the old Palisade parks and I was a quarter finalist at 18. Isn't that fun? And yes, so there you go. I have been in one pageant when I was 18 years old, young and cute. So that's, pat Morris, and I'm glad there's no more pageants. Oh God, give me a break I just the hair, the makeup, the bodies, the swimsuits. Oh, hey, they anyway. I just thought I would read that and have a little levity because of what's going on in the world right now. And don't forget, if no one told you they love you today, then I love you because you are. You. Be yourself, okay, and listen to TikTok bubby on Spotify. Bye.