After John Oliver’s investigation into the Miss America Organization’s claim that they “provide $45 million in scholarships each year” aired, something predictable happened, followed quickly by something strange.
The predictable part: the video went viral, due as much to Oliver’s thoughtful and funny critique as to the proclivities of a big chunk of the internet audience who love nothing more than to mock that which is easily mocked. (Case in point: The now-infamous clip of Miss South Carolina vying for the title of Miss Teen USA 2007 telling Julie Taylor about what “U.S. Americans” need to do in places “like such as the South Africa and the Iraq and such as” has over 61 million views to date.)
And then the strange part: the Miss America Organization responded. And they didn’t even issue one of those fake non-apologies like some sort of politician or Urban Outfitters spokesperson. They doubled down:
“John Oliver reaffirmed that the Miss America Organization (MAO) is the largest scholarship organization for women when he stated the number of scholarship dollars claimed ‘…is more than any other women-only scholarship we could find.’”
As is fitting per the rules of the pageant, the organization’s response post, which went up last night on the official Miss America blog, is a text you could read in 20 seconds or less. The post goes on to repeat the $45 million stat without acknowledging any of the real issues raised by Oliver’s segment, namely, that the fact that the MAO funds can keep their crown of “highest amount of women-only scholarships” is not a point of pride for the pageant so much as a should-be source of shame for everyone else.
Oliver’s show raises a question I am amazed no one’s asked before. Why did it take so long — why did it take a comedian, whose primary job is not to serve as a de facto investigative reporter — to bust the $45 million myth? There’s something astonishing in how the Miss America Organization has gotten way with that “$45 million in scholarships” tagline for so long; in an age of aggressive fact-checking and myth-busting, we’ve collectively allowed this lie to go unexamined.
Maybe that’s because we are inclined to believe the Miss America pageant is just not worth taking seriously, on any level, no matter what. Maybe we are delighting in this news because, all along, we had a hunch that none of these women had any academic ambition whatsoever, so of course there’s no scholarship money; none of these women could possibly be scholars. Maybe we like thinking the contestants are as dumb as the pageantry in which they happily partake.
The temptation to be dismissive of Miss America is huge: it’s a sexist, anachronistic tradition that has outlived its relevance and usefulness, if it could ever have been considered either.
But as much as we rip apart the outdated mores of the pageant, are they really guilty of any double-standards you can’t find anywhere else? Miss America puts a fully-clothed male next to rows of bikini-clad women. This is novel, because…? The expectation that scantily-clad women will serve as set decorations for men in suits is so pervasive, it’s hard to pick just a few examples. But for instance, here is one of Beyonce’s outfits from the “On The Run” tour, and here is one of Jay Z’s. (For full effect, here they are side-by-side.) Naked girls as set dressing in scenes where men barely loosen their ties is just standard practice for your True Detective and Game of Thrones-type shows. As a recent U.N.-backed study found, girls and women in movies are “twice as likely to be naked or in suggestive clothing” than men, “and are just as likely to be sexualized from ages 13 to 39.” So far, not spotting a huge discrepancy between the Miss America Rules For Women and the status quo in the rest of pop culture.
How about the glue contestants use to keep their bikini bottoms on, something else Oliver satirizes in his bit? Yes, adhesive for this purpose is SO hilarious and embarrassing for these women, and I’m sure nothing as degrading is in play to keep the getups of Victoria’s Secret models in place during their annual fashion show or to save plunging necklines from becoming wardrobe malfunctions on the red carpet.
And don’t forget the structure of the pageant: contestants have to pass the swimsuit competition before they even get to the more substantive rounds: the talent display, the Q&A.; That’s so awful, isn’t it? That these women are judged on their looks before anything else? Can you imagine if real life were that way, like, if you had some app on your phone and you decided who was worth talking to or dating based solely on their Facebook profile picture? What if bosses discriminated against female job applicants who didn’t wear makeup? If anytime a woman ran for public office, every news story about her would need to comment on her looks, her fashion, her weight?
I could go on, but TL;DR: there’s no dystopia quite so dystopian for women as the world in which we already, actually live. Not even the Miss America pageant. As an audience, we don’t truly object to the content of this show. We just object to the context. Because, as Oliver’s kicker points out, the Miss America Organization is still giving out more women-only scholarships than any other organization in the country. I’m not a fan of the Miss America apparatus. I am not a beauty pageant apologist. All of this stuff is chauvinist and ridiculous and unfair. But so is literally every other arena in which women live our lives. Is the pageant guilty of anything on that culture at large isn’t guilty of, too? Probably not. It’s just easier to make fun of Miss America and, by extension, easier to dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand.
Which means that things like the $45 million claim can get repeated over and over again without anyone really noticing or caring about the fact that it is false.