Miss America wraps up
Concours de beauté « Miss America » : terminé les maillots de bain !
Le mois dernier, le concours de beauté télévisé « Miss America », créé en 1921, a annoncé que son épreuve du défilé en maillots de bain allait être remplacée par une autre épreuve non centrée sur le physique. Avec cette décision, le concours souhaite s’inscrire dans le mouvement Me Too, mais les spectateurs seront-ils toujours au rendez-vous ? Féminisme et concours de beauté sont-ils compatibles ?
ON JUNE 5th Miss America announced that it would ditch the bikinis and become a “competition”, rather than a pageant. “We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance,” announced Gretchen Carlson, the chairwoman of Miss America’s board of directors, and a former Miss America (1989). “That’s huge.”
QUESTIONS
2. This begs more questions than it answers. Ever since the pageant was launched in 1921, with the aim of finding “The Most Beautiful Bathing Girl in America”, its winners have been united by nothing except their physical attractiveness. If that no longer matters then what does? Ms Carlson’s response to this was unclear. What woman, she asked, in defence of the post-beauty pageant, “doesn’t want to be empowered, learn leadership skills, [...] and be able to show the world who you are as a person from the inside of your soul?”
3. In place of the bikini parade, a contestant in Miss America 2.0, as the show is to be called, will “take part in a live interactive session with the judges, where she will highlight her achieve- ments and goals in life and how she will use her talents [...] to perform the job of Miss America”.
#METOO
4. This change was prompted by the #MeToo movement, in which Ms Carlson has played a lead part. In 2016 she sued Roger Ailes, then chairman of Fox News, for sexual harassment, which led to his downfall. In January she was appointed to head the board of the Miss America Organisation after it was tainted by an unpleasant scandal: the organisation’s former chief executive was alleged to have made nasty and misogynistic comments about former contestants. The announcement of a new, more enlightened Miss America is an attempt to get away from all that. 5. Yet still the question remains: what is the point of an empowered Miss America, if that really is what the organisers have in mind? It may no longer be acceptable to have young women parade in bikinis, but the appeal of that spectacle is at least comprehensible. Launched to attract tourists to Atlantic City, New Jersey, during Labour Day weekend, the pageant has latterly relied on a heavily-male television audience, though its viewership has declined in recent years. Are there as many viewers who want to watch a bunch of random young women talking about Snapchat? Probably not.