BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN








04BEAUTY



By Frank H. Wu

Beauty queens challenge us: what is it we value, and can it be ranked?

      Beauty queens are representative by definition: they serve as idealised models of their own respective state or nation against adversaries who perform the same function for another geographic origin. The beauty contest is a direct rejection of the adage, introduced by otherwise forgotten novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ In 1854, circus impresario P.T. Barnum of ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ fame tried to promote the concept but failed, changing over to daguerreotypes submitted to newspapers for the male gaze.

    The original Miss America competition was held in 1921 by Atlantic City to stimulate tourism after the season would conventionally end, circa Labor Day. It consisted of the Bather’s Revue when the normal swimsuit was a modest one-piece which resembled regular daywear and bronzed skin remained an undesirable marker of days toiling in the fields. Margaret Gorman received the nod as the ‘Golden Mermaid.’ It was only after World War II, when American troops fought in racially segregated units, that the two-piece bikini exposed the female navel. The French engineer who designed the outfit dubbed it the ‘bikini,’ anticipating it would be as shocking to bourgeoise sensibilities as the atomic bomb testing then occurring at the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands.

     Black participants in that bygone era before civil rights would have been similarly scandalous because they were simply prohibited. Miss America Rule 7 required that entrants be ‘of good health and of the white race.’ Miss America 1945, Bess Myerson, was Jewish, to this day the only Miss America practicing that faith, and she of course was urged to change her name. No African American even appeared in the ‘scholarship program,’ however, until Miss Iowa Cheryl Brown, in 1970. That same year, Jennifer Hosten of colonial Grenada became the first Black woman to prevail as Miss World, and the runner up was Pearl Jansen, Miss Africa South, also Black, listed by that epithet since Miss South Africa under the regime of apartheid was perforce white.

    The beauty contest has been criticized for objectifying its subjects since its inception. Carol Hanisch, who popularized the phrase ‘the personal is political,’ led the first protest of the ritual, in 1968, the year MLK and RFK were assassinated, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago disrupted, and Miss Black America began its run. The Hanisch manifesto stated women were oppressed by the ‘degrading mindless-boob-girlie symbol’ with a double standard of seeming ‘both sexy and wholesome.’

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