Fake Boobs, Donald Trump and Miss USA: Why Do Trashy Beauty Pageants Still Exist?

By Lauren Bans, AlterNet. Posted May 22, 2009.

And  the recent, grossly out-of-touch remarks made by Miss Universe during a visit to Guantanamo dispel any remaining notion that pageant titleholders serve a meaningful representative purpose, if they ever did. In a reality where the public has seen photographic evidence of Guantanamo atrocities, and the majority of Americans support President Barack Obama's plan to shut the camp down, Miss Universe cluelessly blogged her visit to Gitmo with all the solemnity of a tween writing home from summer camp, "It was a looooooot of fun!" 

Still, despite the fading relevance of the Miss America institution, pageantry continues to thrive as a small-town hobby. There's a $5 billion child pageant industry that has kindergarten-age girls dyeing their hair and caking on makeup for 5,000 or so annual competitions held in the U.S. The so-called kiddie pageant culture earned a Lynchian creepiness when footage of slain 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey depicted the little girl as a premature sex symbol, dolled up with an overly painted face and a disconcertingly sultry smile.

Once a phenomenon limited to the Deep South -- in a 1997 New Yorker piece, Susan Orlean called child pageants in the region "as common as barbecue" -- the competitions have since expanded to other enclaves of small-town America.

On the local level, pageantry is as much a lucrative hobby as it is a town event for the predominately lower-middle-class families who enter. There are cash prizes as high as $100,000 for babies as young as 1 month old, in categories like "Most Beautiful" and "Prettiest Smile." And the companies that sponsor the events, many started by pageant moms themselves, net profits in the hundreds of thousands for each contest.

What remains of the national pageant, however, is a muddled mockery of what was a quickly outdated premise to begin with.

Miss USA now banks on controversy as much as it banks on bikinis. Miss Teen South Carolina's world map "uh the Iraq, everywhere like such as" answer was the performance that launched a billion dumb-blonde spoofs on YouTube -- and a host of television appearances during which she got to "redo" her answer.

Miss Nevada USA sucked face with girls at clubs and became a national headline. Miss New Jersey dropped out of the Miss USA pageant after becoming pregnant (apparently you can compete having posed for semi-nude photos, but not with a belly bulge). And news of Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner's drinking and coke habits hit tabloids, as did her rehabilitation story, which she sold to People magazine (if there's one thing that sells better than a shamed woman, it's a repentant woman).

Now Carrie Prejean's persecution saga, in the words of the Miss Universe Organization itself, "has given us a lot of publicity, and there's going to be a lot of people watching the Miss USA pageant next year."

Miss USA creates its own controversy, because it needs to. It's not a relevant part of national debate, it's just a tabloid beauty pageant.

See more stories tagged with: women, gay marriage, donald trump, tabloids, carrie prejean, beauty pageants, fake breasts, perez hilton, controversy

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