Featured Miss Missouri has that something extra going for her in Miss USA contest!

I'm not judging anybody. I'm judging the pageant system.

I used to watch it all of the time growing up. My friends and I would have pallet parties and we would scream and yell and get excited over who would win and we got all caught up in it - especially those years in the early 1980's when we personally knew the girls from the Louisiana and one of them made the top 5.

But, then we hit about our late 20's and early 30's and we just had to groan and say "OOOooooooohhhhhhh!"

It's the context of what the pageants represent and the terrible limitations of what makes a good female role model.

 

I have marked several posts that I like and agree with, all of them skeptical of the pageant system and what it represents. I do believe that some systems are better than others, i.e., Miss America seems to be better than the Miss World system. I would say that some Miss Americas are outstanding Christians (from what I can tell.) The one from my town is, as best as I can tell, a wonderful woman (raised a Methodist and now a Baptist) who has used her influence for nothing but good. I could be wrong; only God knows the heart.

But too many pageants are meat markets, and truthfully, much like the slave markets of the bad old days. They appeal primarily to prurient interests (as the Supreme Court once said.)

That said, I am more disturbed by the lesser pageant circuits that put toddlers to pre-teens on a treadmill of constant competition, striving for unattainable "beauty" and, BTW, bankrupting and disrupting families. (Yes, Honey Boo-Boo comes to mind.) This is not particularly unique, because parents push their children into all kinds of things the kids really don't want to do in order to prove their worth. I myself was once an offender; I eventually got over it. And I don't have any statistics to back me up, but I would guess that the young women who do well at the big pageants, by and large, didn't grow up competing in the minor leagues.