Miss American Pageant

It is important, however, to recognize that the Miss America Pageant is a communicative vehicle -- a means of communicating visually a specific ideal and image of the desirable, appealing and attractive American woman. What the pageant and all of the preliminary beauty pageants conducted each year in the United States achieves is the validation of a specific social ideal, image or stereotype. Constant repetition of this image underscores its significance in the minds of viewers. Miss America is never a short, overweight (or too thin) woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a slide rule; she is a tall, statuesque beauty who looks good in a bathing suit and evening gown. Thus, the communication implicit in the pageant is that only a certain "type" of American women is "fit" to be known as "Miss America."

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local pageant organizers or MAO members believe that most American women who reach the age of 19 or 20 have lived lives of sexual abstinence. What drives the determination of the Miss America pageant organizers to insist on the "purity" and "virtue" of contestants is, claims Kennedy (42), "not analysis of the real world, but nostalgia for a fictional American past. In reality, that small-town past was never as virtuous as it appeared, but its unblemished myth is still a powerful force in American life." In 1997, E. R. Shipp (1) called for ending the Miss America Pageant and for recognizing that it has no place in American life. This analyst asked an important question: "After years of women fighting to be taken seriously, does it really make sense to promote contests where young women are judged on their ability to wear a bathing suit and walk in high heels at the same time (Shipp, 1)?" Shipp's (10) answer was a resounding "no." Shipp (1) argues that the pageant is a vestige from an era in which women's greatest aspirations and most viable opportunities lay in marriage. Marriage required that a woman be successful in competing against other women for a man; the more beautiful, charming, talented, and compliant a woman
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Approximate Word count = 3438
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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