The New Yorker:

From 2018: Pageant organizers knows that, even in this era of #MeToo and mainstream feminism, our cultural idea of a “best woman” still involves physical beauty.

By Jia Tolentino

The weather for Miss America this year was thematic. In the hour before the competition, families in formal wear and teen-age girls in glittering sashes made their way across the Atlantic City boardwalk, bracing themselves against fiendish wind gusts and gray rain. The organization is similarly beleaguered at the moment. Late last year, its C.E.O. was forced to resign, after he was exposed, in a series of leaked e-mails, denigrating past winners as “huge” and “gross.” In January, Gretchen Carlson, Miss America 1989, became the pageant’s new chairwoman. In June, she announced that the pageant would be dropping its trademark swimsuit competition, rebranding the evening-gown portion as an interactive red-carpet experience, and no longer judging the women on their looks. Miss America would be “a competition,” not a pageant, she told “Good Morning America,” claiming that this change would attract more sponsors and more participants. “Who doesn’t want to be empowered, learn leadership skills, and pay for college, and be able to show the world who you are as a person, from the inside of your soul?” she said. Sure, Miss America was founded as a swimsuit competition, in 1921, and, yes, it bans married and divorced women, and also mothers, from competition. (In 1999, after the C.E.O. at the time lifted a long-standing ban on women who have had abortions, he was fired.) But now the organization’s home page features a woman in a billowing petal-pink skirt and white Converse, and everything is branded “Miss America 2.0.”

On Sunday night, the women walking through the lobby of Boardwalk Hall were wearing sky-high platform stilettos. Regional pageant winners carried their crowns in glass-box purses. A small child and her mother, both in sparkly shift dresses, tottered to the bathroom in matching silver heels. I spotted three young women wearing identical navy gowns with jewelled bodices, each topped with a sash that read “miss georgia girl.” They were drinking virgin strawberry daiquiris. “We’re all pageant sister-queens!” Karah, age sixteen, said. Abigail and Annabelle, fifteen and thirteen, flashed brilliant smiles. This trip was Annabelle’s first time on a plane, she told me. They loved competing in pageants because of the friendships. “Everyone thinks the pageant world is ‘Toddlers & Tiaras’—like, just fake teeth and competition,” Karah said. “But we’re a family. Pageantry is about volunteering together, and, like, breathing in hair spray, and going to six-hour photo shoots, and just having fun.” I walked to my seat, where I met a twenty-one-year-old named Sydne, from Pennsylvania, who wore a crisp white jumpsuit with a “miss midstate” sash on top. She’d originally started competing in pageants because she liked “Toddlers & Tiaras,” she told me. She was happy that the swimsuit competition had been axed. “A lot of people are really against the change,” she said, “but, for me, after I competed in Teen, I didn’t join Miss right away, because I hesitated at the idea of swimsuit. Pageantry is really about showcasing your inner beauty—what you do, and how you inspire others.”

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