By now we’ve all had a good laugh at dumb Miss Utah (AKA Marissa Powell) and enjoyed a bit of collective schadenfreude: Oh sure, she’s generically hot, but she’s sooooo stupid! My boobs may not be as perky, but at least I know how to talk about income inequality! Hahaha!
I’m starting to feel sorry for her. One little mistake on national television and her career as a cable news anchor-bot may be finished. This is not the kind of mistake Gretchen Carlson would have made. Tsk.Tsk.
Seriously though…I feel sorry for her. How well would you do being asked a random current events question live, on national television? As Linda Holmes points out on NPR.org, “She’s not in the news for being dumb; she’s in the news for being bad at spontaneous but convincing balderdash manufacturing, and because it’s fun to watch a carefully orchestrated spectacle crash on the rocks.”
Holmes goes on to point out that these questions aren’t meant to elicit profound answers, they’re really just meant to test public speaking skills. When a pageant contestant says something that makes her sound dumb the blogosphere piles on because who doesn’t love watching a pretty young woman – who we all assume (fair or not) has had an easy time in life because of her good looks – bungle a question we all think we could answer so much better?
I also think that this situation highlights how archaic and irrelevant beauty pageants have become. Pageants are silly, shallow and bad for women. This girl probably grew up hearing how beautiful she is rather being asked about her favorite book or what she likes studying in school. She’s a victim of the princessification of little girls. Looks first, brains second.
The Miss America pageant is a little better than Miss USA in that there has historically been a focus on talent, accomplishments and a social cause, but it is still fueled by an archaic view of women: It’s great that you’re a flute virtuoso, but you’d better fill out that bikini or you can forget about that scholarship money, missy.
That’s right. The Miss America pageant is the single biggest provider of scholarship money for young women in the United States. Still. To this day.
Many highly successful women (Diane Sawyer, Oprah and several politicians) started out as pageant queens because it was and is viewed as a way to earn scholarships and increase one’s profile. Before the women’s movement we unselfconsciously celebrated pageant winners without considering some of the negative values that were being instilled or how we were objectifying these women. Even as late as the ‘80s I remember watching the Miss America pageant and being awestruck by the gorgeous princesses floating across the screen. Many had real talent (such as the eventually dethroned Vanessa Williams), but they still had to look and behave like fairytale princesses. Looks first, brains second.
I really wish that so many smart and beautiful young women didn’t have to put on a swimsuit to earn their college money through the Miss America organization. I wish that the even more shallow Miss USA pageant – owned by that champion of women’s rights, Donald Trump – didn’t exist at all. In fact, it doesn’t have to exist. If none of us watched it NBC wouldn’t air it.
In a sense, we’re all responsible for Miss Utah’s botched answer. As long as we continue to send the message to little girls that their looks are more important than their smarts, as long as pretty girls continue to get the message that their beauty is their most important asset and as long as we continue to support these ideas through our interactions and consumer habits there will be more Miss Utahs for us laugh at on Facebook. Who knows? Maybe Powell is actually smart, but just choked when being asked a question on national television. Since that night she’s demonstrated that she at least has a sense of humor, appearing on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ to poke fun at herself. Most of us wouldn’t do any better — despite what we think — so let’s the cut the poor girl some slack. Instead, we could all just stop watching these inane, outmoded schlockfests and celebrate young women for their accomplishments alone without requiring that they also look like beauty queens.