Miss America Gets Rid of Swimsuit Competition

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On a John Oliver segment that aired a few years ago, John Oliver asked: “Beauty Pageants: How Is This Still a Thing?” Indeed, with a focus on weird strangers judging women from other parts of the country based solely on looks, specifically looks in a bikini, it felt like the beauty pageant was this holdover from some kind of frog boiling dystopian reality that we are all somehow still trapped in. Well, it sounds like Miss America, the biggest beauty pageant of them all, the north star for these kinds of endeavors so to speak, feels the same way, and has made it official that it will be ending the swimsuit portion of the event.

The announcement was made by Fox News commentator and 1989 pageant winner Gretchen Carlson, who took over the event following a #MeToo scandal involving the judges making misogynistic comments based on the contestants’ looks. She announced on Good Morning America:

“We are not going to judge you on your outward appearance. We want more women to know that they are welcome in this organization. We are moving it forward and evolving it in this cultural revolution”.

Swimsuit Competition – 2017
Swimsuit Competition – 1921

To say this has been a long time coming is an understatement. Although the swimsuit portion of the event will undoubtedly have its defenders, in some account the swimsuit portion of the event has been criticized for a very long time. As quoted in the New York Times, Leonard Horn, the chief executive in 1993 said:

“We are not stupid. We are very sensitive to the fact that the swimsuit competition has always been our Achilles’ heel. The swimsuit competition has been controversial since the early 1920s, but it’s been retained because the majority of the people like it.”

This kind of straight talk is very refreshing, considering every conservative voice alive is indeed pretending to be stupid, but whatever. The bikini portion is over and done with.

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