There she is...

This week, American media achieved the newsworthiness trifecta. Timeliness, conflict, and prominence, you ask? No, silly. I’m talking about drugs, Donald Trump, and girl-on-girl action. Alert the cable networks! No need to bum everyone out with that whole Iraq business this week!

For those who have better things to do than follow entertainment news, Miss USA was nearly dethroned after her drunken nights in NY clubs kissing her fellow woman and testing positive for cocaine. People seem most unnerved by the underage drinking aspect, which should have all the shock factor as the revelation that the majority of Americans have premarital sex. Maybe we can use the leftoever grant money to discover that teenagers like the rock music and dentists suggest brushing after meals.

Anyhoo, as much as I’d like, I can’t feign disinterest. Much to Jimmy’s complete disgust/bewilderment/shame, I am fascinated by pageants. I must watch them. If you haven’t spent much time watching and comparing these spectacles, please allow me to break them down. There’s Miss America, the classiest of the pageant family, in which a drinking game could be devised around every utterance of “scholarship competition.” You’d be dancing on the table before Miss Alabama introduced herself. Miss USA, Miss America’s trashier younger cousin, is my personal favorite. A Miss USA contestant might not be especially sharp or beautiful, but she is willing to bend a few rules of propriety to garner attention. I do admire the lack of pretense – they’re only a few years of bad ratings away from the introduction of the pole-dancing competition. However, it is Miss Teen USA that brings tears to my eyes. If you’ve never seen Miss Teen USA, I beg of you to tune in for the question and answer round. They might be talking, but they’re not saying a damn thing -- yet the audience goes wild as if the secret for Israeli-Palestinian peace had just been revealed. This ties into the apparent goal of pageants: for a woman to speak without communicating and to appear sexually desirable without seeming sexual. Many people defend pageantry by stating how difficult it is. Let’s not confuse a difficult endeavor with a worthwhile one.

But yet, I watch.

Maybe the reason I watch pageants is because I insist that they must be a big inside joke that I’m not in on. It’s mind boggling to hear charges of sexism so breezily dismissed when we’re not exactly dealing with gray area here. Young women trot like circus poodles, seeking “scholarship money” while wearing bikinis and stilettos, rubbing hemorroid cream under their eyes and Vaseline on their teeth, and speaking without ideas. Talent is restricted to singing, playing an instrument, or some other talent revered in more Jane Austen-esque days (I don't mean to disparage the performing arts, but what about young women who prefer to play with a microscope than a microphone?). The “substance” of the show is about what these young women want to be... their aspirations in law, medicine, or advocacy sound as pretty as they are. Why are pageants restricted to the young and dreaming? Perhaps because the reality of women’s potential isn’t always quite as pretty?

Hosts gush that all girls watching pageants dream about their chance, and I admit I’m among them. I’ve had the plan for some time: I’d work my way up the pageantry system, advocating such original platforms as anti-crime or pro-education legislation. I’d show off my mediocre ballet. I’d push up my boobs, cinch my waist, then lick my lips and speak of abstinence. And then when the dream was realized, when I’d stand on that glorious Atlantic City stage, state sash draped across my sparkly gown and lips slipping off my Vaselined teeth, Regis Philbin would ask about my vision for the world.

“I dream of a world in which women control their reproductive health, where men worry as much as women do about balancing parental and professional responsibilities, where Congress and the Fortune 500 don't consist nearly exclusively of white men, where all adults are free to marry whom they choose, and where PACs no longer find tax exemptions as religious organizations. Thank you.” (This is when I’d curtsy and do the cute little wave to the section of North Carolinians, who by this time were taking their state cut-out with them as they walked out of the door.)