Reddit’s TheDonald is losing it over the Miss America pageant dropping the swimsuit competition

I think Robyn Pennacchia summed it up quite well over on Wonkette (emphasis mine):

The likelihood that any of these men are actually sitting around jerking off to the Miss America pageant these days, when they can easily see any number of women in bathing suits (and less!) on their computers, is practically nil. They’re not mad, really, that Miss America is taking their boners away — they simply fear a world where parading a bunch of women onstage to be judged for their bikini bods is no longer considered mainstream and normal. Living in a society where it’s normal do this to women but not to men — there is a Mr. America, but it’s a bodybuilding competition and definitely not quite the same thing — is a sign that they still hold power in a way we do not. Getting rid of it signifies more than a loss of boners, but a loss of power.

It would make more sense to just stop with the whole embarrassing thing, don’t you think?

Watching the pageant is as close as those idiots get to actually having a conversation with a woman that does not involve a financial exchange…and I mean a cashier in a store, not a “professional lady.”

Will a nerd now win Miss America?

There’s a good chance one already has, although I don’t follow it enough to know for sure. But my point being that you can be conventionally attractive and nerdy at the same time. I do remember from the times in the distant past that I’ve watched it, there were plenty of contestants studying in STEM fields. I mean, I’m not defending the organization at all. Beauty pageants are problematic in ways I do not need to point to anyone here. That does not mean that contestants and winners have all been bimbos.

Plus, I’m sure that the winners will still be conventionally attractive.

The ratings for Miss America have been down for many years now. It used to be a major prime time TV event when I was a kid. Now I think it’s on one of the cable stations that aren’t included in the more basic packages. The reactionaries that hang out in the darker corners of the internet might not think so, but it seems to me that the general public has come around to the more feminist point of view on pageants. That they’re shallow, objectifying and outdated. It seems to me like this was a good business decision. Whether it will revive the event I don’t know, but they had to make some change.

When I was a kid, beauty pageants were for girls. Only femoids (of various ages) watched them. Now manlymen are mourning their premature demise. How the window has shifted, to be sure.

The SJWs forget that humans have three components – mind, body, and soul.

Maybe it’s time we started having soul pageants.

Every time I hear about a beauty pageant, I wonder how this is still a thing. Would anyone be worse off if Miss America ceased to exist?

@Moggie

I do something similar. I remember only a year or two ago, when hearing about Ms. America (probably something having to do with Trump), I was legitimately surprised it still existed. I couldn’t remember having heard about it for years.

Less of a peep show, but at core the same
Sending women through an uninspired game
Remembered as a title, but rarely as a name
Just cut the rope and run

Palate maladjusted to the tastes of today
It’s not the audience behaving this way
Just a couple of fucks taking the chance to bay
Just cut the rope and run

Not a single memory, not even a taste
Yet the move to rant on was taken with haste
Honestly, have they more memory to waste?
Just cut the rope and run

My senior year of HS, we had a general geeks, punks, nerds and dweebs revolt, and pushed hard until we elected one of our Super Nerd Queens homecoming queen. She was an immigrant, and wore a gorgeous formal sari and her coke bottle glasses. Never been prouder of my tribe!

At least if a chemistry nerd were competing (and if there was a bathing suit portion) she’d find a better way to get her bathing suit bottom to stay in place through the walking and turning and walking some more to stand in a row while other women go walking and turning and walking…The glue stick trick isn’t foolproof.

And no, I will not be telling anyone anything about the ‘glue stick trick’ or how I might know about it or anything of the sort!

@Moggie

The advertisers? 😛

I have to say I agree with DigitalScetis…the Miss America pageant is an anachronism. However, if the pageant was still going strong, and remained as popular as it was in the 1970s, these MRA/MGTOW types would still find reasons to criticize it, and the women taking part in it. There’s no pleasing those turds.

A related issue – pro football cheerleaders. Another anachronism that needs to end.

On the point “will a nerd win miss America contest” the answer is fairly simple. Pretty much all of them since the mid 90’s. Miss America is scholarship pageant. To be a contestant, one must want and be elligible for college. This means that all contestants have in the upper tier in terms of academic grades. This could make them “nerds” in the wide sense of the term (AKA someone good at school). The reason they have the reputation to be stupid is due to the fact they are asked stupid question and about 7 seconds to answer them, so of course the answer is always to be a complete cliché. Everybody would sound stupid in such circumstances.

Trump owned beauty pageants, so naturally, this would be a concern of his bros.

Anyone think Jared Leto is the next to go down in the Me Too flames now that he’s getting his own Joker movie?

There’s all sorts of rumors that he does kink stuff without permission fro one night stands and that he goes after underage girls. It’s been strange to me that he hasn’t been part of the perv purges yet.

He was only good in the My So Called Life days anyway. Leave him in the 90’s where he belongs.

Hopefully this is another nail in the coffin of the beauty pageant in general, and we can phase them out.

Seems to be working in New Zealand. Back in the 80s we’d all watch it, although that was probably because there were only two TV channels, and there were probably sheepdog trials on the other, but now it’s a complete non-event. I’ve a vague idea it still exists, but it’s in massive decline, and treated with disdain by the young women who would be eligible to enter. Over summer they tried to run one at the beach and nobody entered. It’s become some tacky boring thing from the olden days that your creepy uncle reminisces about in a vaguely distasteful manner, and good riddance.

Anyone think Jared Leto is the next to go down in the Me Too flames now that he’s getting his own Joker movie?

I’m waiting for any white het actor to go down in those flames, really.

@Dalilama

Because you think that most if not all white het actors (and, just to be clear, are we using this in the gender-neutral sense) is guilty of sexual harassment, so it’s more of a not-surprised-that-it-happened thing?

Miss America is less than 100 years old, if I recall correctly. And has steadily been losing cultural currency for at least the last 50 of those, too. The idea that a bathing-suit pageant is some kind of “cultural icon” is laughable when you consider the actual history of it, and the fact that it was considered immoral by traditionalists when it first began in the 1920s. A mere 40ish years after that, feminists smelled the already-stale blood in the water, rightly pegged the pageant’s rigid beauty standard (and the impossible amount of grooming it required) as oppressive, and demonstrated against it by tossing bras and girdles into garbage cans in Atlantic City while it was on. This protest was later mischaracterized as a “bra-burning”, which it wasn’t. But later, just such a demo was in fact staged by an antifeminist man who hired models to act as his fake feminist demonstrators in an effort to ridicule the valid, original feminist protest. (The false image of “bra-burning women’s libbers”, alas, caught on…and not just among the antis.) The pageant has had to do all kinds of twists and turns to maintain a semblance of relevance in a world where women kept proving that their looks weren’t everything, hence the scholarship program. And on and on it limped, with women forever questioning its continued existence while the men just ogled and drooled and traded slimy speculations on what they’d like to do to Miss Wherever. Nobody, I daresay, was fooled by the talent part, or the sugary responses to questions on how the contestants would change the world. Nobody gave a shit. It was all about the near-nudity on heels, and who “wore” it best.

And now, at long last, swimsuit competitions are finally being declared obsolete? What the hell TOOK them so long?

And of course, the menzers are whining, because they’re being denied one eensy, weensy, conservative, antiquated bit of trophy-women-on-display objectification. OH THE HUMANITY! HOWEVER WILL THEIR PENISES SURVIVE THE ONSLAUGHT??? MISANDRY!!!!!

I should enter this you know since they’re all whining a fattie (like me) will win this
All I need is purple hair

Potatosurplus is on to me. I would definitely like a genderless society, or rather a society where there are no gender roles and where individuals have total freedom of gender expression.

The most surprising thing about this article is that people still watch beauty pagents, tbh. Like, how many of these people would have actually known about this if it hadn’t been reported?

When I was in high school, we had a boy’s pageant for seniors every year. Obviously if didn’t involve swimsuits or anything like that cause, you know, minors, but it was a nice little twist.

@Ariblester
Given the context of #MeToo, I didn’t think I needed to specify that I was talking about men. And, as far as I am aware, no het white man who has an on-screen presence has yet faced any career consequences from #MeToo. It beggars belief that none of these men are sexually predatory, but their fame and straight flush of privilege have so far shielded all of them.

An ex-con (he did time for threatening to kill Obama) incel is running for congress.

David you should research this guy and see what else you can find;

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/06/01/hes-pro-incest-pedophilia-and-rape-hes-also-running-for-congress-from-his-parents-house/?utm_term=.9b4be992f67a

@Dalilama

Given the context of #MeToo, I didn’t think I needed to specify that I was talking about men.

Fair point.

And, as far as I am aware, no het white man who has an on-screen presence has yet faced any career consequences from #MeToo.

Well, maybe Louis CK.

It beggars belief that none (all?) of these men are sexually predatory, but their fame and straight flush of privilege have so far shielded all of them.

Too right.

I love how they act like they were avid watchers of Miss America before all this. I bet they can’t even name the state of the last woman who won.

I also love how they act like ~SJWs~ are responsible for this. The criticism of the swimsuit and evening gown segments was going on before my Millennial ass was even alive.

Who actually does watch pageants? I bet the demographics would be rather interesting.

A girl I went to high school with took part in the Miss Saskatoon pageant a year or two after we graduated. Which I’ve always found a bit odd since she was a punk rock sort of girl in high school, even having blue hair at one point.

I don’t think beauty pageants were ever a big thing here.

They certainly weren’t televised in ma lifetime of 35 years.

And you’d maybe find a notice about a pageant in the newspaper if a German woman won a world wide competition and it was a slow news day. It’s the kind of thing the editor asks for when they have white space to fill and no ads to cover it.

But…but…but…their BOOOOONNNNERRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!111
As others have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that they even watch the Miss America pageant. But what would we do if the world decided that women could be worth something besides their hotness?

We beat America to it here with a male contestant winning a ‘Miss’ pageant in the UK. It was in the 1990’s in Worthing I believe, but can’t find it online any more. He entered as a prank with in collaboration with his mother and sister (they did his hair, make – up and outfit.) Things went further than they anticipated, having never expected to win.

The ratings for Miss America have been down for many years now. It used to be a major prime time TV event when I was a kid. Now I think it’s on one of the cable stations that aren’t included in the more basic packages. The reactionaries that hang out in the darker corners of the internet might not think so, but it seems to me that the general public has come around to the more feminist point of view on pageants. That they’re shallow, objectifying and outdated. It seems to me like this was a good business decision. Whether it will revive the event I don’t know, but they had to make some change.

Miss Sweden has also declined enormously. Back in the early 1990:s it was still a pretty big thing, but towards the end of the 1990:s it was in massive decline basically because feminism. I’ll actually have to google whether Miss Sweden still exists? *Googling* Ok so it was cancelled in 2003, started up again by a bathing suit company but with far less attention, ran for a couple of years more, cancelled again… Now there’s apparently this small and completely unknown competition where the winner still gets to go to Miss Universe.

Oh could they be any more predictable

Like they ever watched it anyway. Although there is something quite charming about the idea of the manosphere making popcorn and settling in to watch Miss America. Perhaps they put up bunting and have cocktails.

By ‘Beauty Pageant’ in Sweden, I get the feeling they were referring to who got to be Lucia that one year where there was an ‘outrage’ that she was black…

Some time way back when they still showed Miss Sweden on television my mum was upset that there were a couple of WoC in the line-up. She was like “but it’s called miss Sweden. Not miss International!” When I disagreed with her she honestly thought I was just arguing for arguments sake, since she couldn’t see how anyone could possibly disagree with her for real.

True story.

TIL, Gretchen Carlson is the Chair of the Miss America Board of Trustees, and this is delicious 😄

I remember watching the Miss World pageant on UK TV in the early 1970s. It was still a big televisual event then, drawing a huge audience. I think interest went into a sharp decline after that, and probably few people noticed when it stopped being televised in the 1980s.

@Kate

I also love how they act like ~SJWs~ are responsible for this.

Bingo. It’s almost as if they can’t actually tell the difference between a private entity making a monetary decision as a result of demographic changes (*coughGamerGatecough*) and a concerted effort from activists to impress that change from without. Social activists were not hounding the Miss America pageant.

This topic does bring to mind a great scene from the movie The Big Short (a must see for everybody, but will leave you wanting to punch something) where Margot Robbie in a bath tub explains mortgage-backed securities and subprime loans directly to the audience. It just think it would be awesome if beauty pageants were combined with like… Bill Nye the Science Guy and we had models (of any gender, really) teaching people about fracture dynamics or phase transition. Okay, those are fairly advanced topics, but breaking stuff is always fun, right?

In other bad news for people who love rape culture and the dehumanization of women, the judge who famously gave Brock Turner a slap on the wrist for rape has been recalled

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aaron-persky-brock-turner-judge-recalled_us_5b102d65e4b05ef4c22c1b8b

And hopefully this other piece of good news will shut up the media and their gleeful predictions of the fizzling of the blue wave for at least the rest of the week

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lauren-arthur-democrat-missouri-special-election-senate_us_5b175388e4b09578259cc336

I mean, seriously. The past month on MSNBC they keep talking about how things maybe don’t look so great for the Dems in November after all. Based on no evidence except for the pundit class disapproving of even the suggestion that they might run on an anti-Trump platform. This is supposed to be the “liberal” media. It’s really frustrating. On the one hand, the pundits say it’s a problem for the Democrats that so many people don’t know their have already been indictments from the Mueller probe. Then they turn around and say Democrats should run on “bread and butter” issues instead of Trump’s corruption.

Nothing to do with the post, but…

The Lego Movie 2 trailer was released yesterday and it happens to include the following line spoken to one of the female characters from the first movie: “So you fought and masterbuilt and kicked butt and the hapless male was the leader?”

I watched the trailer on YouTube and amidst the comments from regular folks just excited about the movie there are a fair number of idiots crying about SJWs and feminism.

I guess every movie where women have a role outside of total wallflower or damsel in distress is now fodder for whiny manosphere losers.

Alt-Right: WHy do you SJWs want to ruin the Miss America pageant?!

SJWs: They’re still holding the Miss America pageant?

Regarding the nerds winning the Miss America pageant, one of the winners was a classmate of my sister at college. She entered the contest as she needed money for college. She was very intelligent, and continued school beyond a mere bachelor’s degree. Of course, she was also quite beautiful, or she would not have won.

I think that beauty pageants are an anachronism, and should end (well, really, I think they should never have started), but I completely understand why someone would enter one, given the reality of who gets to go to college and who does not. If my sister’s classmate had been rich, she would not have entered the contest. Probably, she would not have entered if college were free, though given that one still has living expenses, perhaps she would still have needed money to attend college.

Katamount:

It just think it would be awesome if beauty pageants were combined with like… Bill Nye the Science Guy and we had models (of any gender, really) teaching people about fracture dynamics or phase transition. Okay, those are fairly advanced topics, but breaking stuff is always fun, right?

Well, there are good-looking youtubers who explain stuff. Not actual models, and modestly dressed, but with more than adequate canthal tilt etc. Thanks to Dianna Cowen, aka Physics Girl, I now know about the intermediate axis theorem, and her producer, Jabrils, has some fun videos on machine learning.

I can’t imagine wanting science lessons from swimsuit models, no matter how smart. Seems like mixed signals to me.

@kobun37

Have you seen the Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer? Exactly the same thing, just with Vanellope and the Disney Princesses throwing all the shade on Disney’s historical sexism instead.

It’s fucking wonderful, and not just because Disney’s one of my lifelong problematic faves.

Can’t wait to see if @thelindsayellis has anything to say about that trailer, SFHC.

@Moggie:

I can’t imagine wanting science lessons from swimsuit models, no matter how smart. Seems like mixed signals to me.

I’d take it about as seriously as Monty Python’s sketch that had Carol Cleveland rolling seductively around on a bed while lip syncing John Cleese giving a lecture on something boring like accounting or something. Hilarious, but I don’t think I remembered anything about what John/Carol were talking about. 😀

Miss America is being destroyed by noted SJW *checks notes* Gretchen Carlson!

Dvärghundspossen:

I’ve gotten the impression Miss Universe was once largely a whiteness contest for white women representing “white” countries. That’s why succeeding in that game was a huge deal for Finns, who in the early 20th century were often thought of as half Asian or something to that effect. Obviously, the winner of the national contest would’ve had to be reasonably Aryan looking.

Nowadays, the Miss Finland contest seems to only get media attention if the winner is a WoC who makes the racist haters crawl out from under rocks. Meanwhile, the Miss Universe contest is best known for a recently reported 2006 groping incident involving a Finnish contestant and you-know-who.

One can’t help but make an analogy to privilege here.

These men are whining that they’re “no longer focusing on looks”, but that’s not what was said.

All the pageant said they were doing was easing off of looks a little by getting rid of some of the portions that were looks-heavy.

Yet again, the Status Quo Warriors lament that something is being taken away from them, when one, I doubt they actually gave a fuck in the first place, and two, it’s not actually going away, there’s just less of it.

A fat woman is going to win? Woo hoo!!! I have a shot at the title!!!