Ladies: imagine stripping down to your bra and underwear and strapping on a pair of heels. Then imagine parading across a stage in front of millions of viewers while a panel of judges scrutinizes you, scoring you on your body.
This nightmare becomes a reality when you realize what’s being described is the Lifestyle and Fitness portion of the Miss America Pageant, and it’s something thousands of girls submit themselves to willingly.
The Lifestyle and Fitness in Swimsuit portion (commonly referred to as just the swimsuit portion) is designed to test the overall physical fitness, poise and posture of a contestant. From merely looking at a girl walking across the stage in a bikini and high heels, judges have the miraculous ability to determine how healthy and in shape that particular girl is—what a fantastic feat, to be able to know all about her health from watching her 20-second-walk across stage!
How can one determine another’s lifestyle or fitness from watching her walk across a stage in a skimpy bathing suit? Besides aesthetics, judges have nothing else to base their scores off of. Health, much like beauty, comes in all shapes and sizes. The only people that should be determining how fit a person is are certified doctors and trainers, not a panel of beauty pageant judges.
Health is as abstract as beauty. There’s no formula for beauty just as there’s no way to determine how fit a woman is based off her appearance. A thin woman isn’t necessarily a healthy one—and no one can know that until she undergoes rounds of testing with her physician. The same goes for an overweight woman; just because she’s heavier doesn’t mean she’s unhealthy.
There isn’t a direct correlation between beauty and health, but Miss America makes it appear as though there is. The pageant rules state a healthy lifestyle is promoted through this section of the competition, but the underlying meaning and reasoning for this portion is as simple as this: if you aren’t thin, then you aren’t beautiful, and if you aren’t beautiful, you can’t be Miss America.
Promoting a healthy lifestyle? Sure. But scrutinizing a woman as she walks past and deeming her unfit because, genetically, she holds more weight in her arms, or her legs, or her stomach? Disgusting.
The Swimsuit portion is ridiculous enough as it is, but get this—the Lifestyle and Fitness competition is worth 15 percent of the contestant’s overall score—and the on-stage question, the only portion of the entire competition where girls have a chance to showcase their knowledge and wit, only counts for five percent. This is ironic, considering Miss America prides itself for having “the world’s largest provider of scholarship assistance for young women,” according to their national website.
The Miss America Organization gives out more than $45 million in cash and scholarship assistance each year, not just to the winners of the competition, also to the girls that compete in the state and local competitions as well. While this is a wonderful thing—how nice of Miss America to help girls afford college! —it would be wrong to forget about the millions of girls across the country struggling to get scholarships for school; taking the SAT multiple times, aiming for perfect grades throughout high school, volunteering and slaving over applications—seems like a lot of work when all you have to do to get a scholarship from Miss America is look good in a bikini.
What’s on the outside is far more important than what’s on the inside, despite what society has been teaching their young for the last few decades, and that is not okay. Deeming a woman beautiful because her weight matches up perfectly with her height is not a message that should be sent to young girls, or teenage girls, or even adult women. Girls should be focusing on becoming intelligent, well-rounded women as they grow up, not focusing on how to look best in a bathing suit.
Although the Miss America foundation is making movements towards becoming a well-rounded competition, it still hasn’t come that far. In 1920, judges used a literal breakdown of female features to calculate the winner, assigning points based off what they believed was ideal—five points if she had the ideal nose, four if it was slightly off center, 10 if she had perfect eyes, but only 4 if they were too close together.
While Miss America has risen slightly, it still wades in quite a shallow pool, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. As a woman, it seems the best thing you can do is get to swimming in that pool—perhaps you’ll be able to achieve that bikini ready body, because, at least according to the standards set by Miss America, beauty triumphs over brains.
