by Lyz Bly
I'm Miss World… Somebody Kill Me

May has been a month of reprogramming for me. After a grueling first year in a Ph.D. program at Case, I've spent the last 30 days recuperating on the couch, leafing through a year's worth of magazines, perusing ebay on my laptop, and channel surfing. I have a love-hate relationship with television; my fascination with popular culture often informs my scholarly endeavors, yet I am frequently repulsed by what I see and by what many people deem entertaining. I am also vexed at how often TV validates gender and racial stereotypes. And what troubles me most is that television program producers believe that American viewers understand the real world to be a place full of rigid boundaries and conceptions about gender roles.

On the evening of June 1, while changing television channels, I was shocked and then infuriated, as I paused on the Miss Universe pageant. Apparently, my de-programming mission was not over, because after a year in academia, where the only stage-walking women do is to give a lecture or to grab their diplomas, I had truly forgotten that Miss Universe/America/Ohio pageants were still in existence. Mesmerized, I paused on the channel long enough to see six contestants saunter across the stage during the evening gown competition. What was most striking about these women was that they all looked the same. Regardless of their race, they were all roughly the same height, all had the same trim little waists, and the same sized – C or D cup, no doubt – breasts. Their teeth gleamed a bleached white, and, aside from Miss Trinidad & Tobago, who had her straightened hair swept up in a chignon, all of the contestants had longer than shoulder-length locks. Despite the internationalism implied by the pageant title, all of the women looked like American Barbie dolls, right down to the thigh-high slits in their floor-skimming gowns.

Who needs the kind of drastic standardization depicted in the classic – and newly remade – film, "The Stepford Wives" when we have plastic surgeons and stylists who can remake and transform women into seemingly perfect carbon copies of each other? I didn't stay tuned to see the talent competition; maybe that's what separated the winners from the losers. In my dreams… The next morning, as I sipped my coffee and skimmed the newspaper, I found an Associated Press report on the pageant. Coincidentally, five of the six women that I saw were the top five winners. Not surprisingly, white Barbie doll clone Jennifer Hawkins of Australia was the pageant winner.

I have a vague memory of a made-for-television movie that came out in the early 1970s when I was about seven or eight years old. It centered on a feminist woman who decided to compete in the Miss America pageant and, if she won, she would eschew the crown and deliver a speech on women's rights and gender equality. My grandmother was babysitting me the night that the movie aired, and I remember her being scandalized by the feminist character, "She has an ugly personality," she told me. Predictably, the main character won the pageant and, of course, she couldn't go through with her feminist speech. My grandmother smiled smugly as the "reformed" winning contestant walked across the stage, tears streaming down her face, clutching an overflowing rose bouquet. I wasn't so content with the character's decision and ultimate lack of courage. I felt uneasy and disappointed with her acquiescence – the once strong, spirited young woman fell apart at the sight of a rhinestone encrusted crown and an armful of flowers. "Is this what I have to look forward to?" I thought.

Fortunately, on a personal level, I have not lacked courage when it comes to speaking up about women's rights, so my childhood fear did not come to fruition. However, after viewing just a few minutes of the 2004 Miss Universe pageant, I realized that the very fact that these pageants still exist demonstrates that we haven't evolved that much since the 1970s.

When Courtney Love wailed, "I'm Miss World, somebody kill me," in the 1994 Hole single "Miss World," she didn't literally mean "kill me." She meant that the idea of beauty queens, beauty pageants, and all that they represent should be destroyed, shattered. If gender is a socially created construct (and many people who have pondered these issues for decades define it that way), the continued presence of institutions, rituals, and visual images that maintain and advocate narrow beliefs about masculine and feminine roles and behaviors impedes our cultural evolution when it comes to gender equality. For this reason, established spectacles like the Miss Universe pageant should be abolished.

I wonder how the 1970s film about the feminist Miss America contestant would look if it were remade today. If television producers are correctly reading the American public, my guess is it would end the same. The key difference would be the addition of several scenes focused on the main character's visits to her plastic surgeon. from Cool Cleveland contributor Lyz Bly

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