I live out west so I could have watched the pageant after the game but instead listened to Pat Thurston. The way I learned about the result was hearing the ABC News Radio bulletin at 9pm...ironically the time when the pageant was to be shown tape delayed on my local ABC station! In any case I think the Packers/49ers game got higher ratings than Miss America.
Now let me crash the party with my usual skeptical-minded anti-pageant rant.
So Hagan wants to end child abuse and is a good dancer? Good on her and congrats on the college scholarship! But of course my usual pet peeve, why the F___ should LOOKS be a condition to be a winner? What about all the average-looking, average-income women out there who've got talent and reams yet will never get to stand on the same stage as these pampered, over-privileged brats? The truth is: to be "Miss America" is HARDLY an accomplishment but rather an accident of lucky genes. Will employers read a resume with "Miss America", "Miss Some-Rural-County-In-the-Heartland", etc. and immediately pick up the phone with excitement? NO! Beauty pageants are the shame of America (and other countries in the world that sanction them), by being a self-celebration of the Lucky DNA Club. Instead of celebrating people because they look better than others, why not celebrate people who devote themselves to the betterment of all humankind or who contribute great, useful, groundbreaking ideas in the intellectual or technological fields.
Oh, call me a chauvinistic MRA, but I wonder why society prefers celebrating the beauty of women but not of men. It's not throwing men under the bus rather it's a consequence of the Religion of Gender Roles, where women are expected to be passive eye candy while men are the full human beings.
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