By David Futrelle
After hearing the news that the Miss America pageant is dropping its swimsuit and evening gown competitions to focus more on talent and brains, I headed over to Reddit to see what the resident misogynists were saying about the end of these noble traditions dumb things.
I expected some fulminating in places like the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit (and there was some), but it turns out that the Redditors who have the most to say on the subject are the Trump superfans who populate the TheDonald subreddit.
In countless threads on the subreddit today, TheDonald’s angry young (mostly) men set forth their trenchant critiques of the move.
More than a few of the critiques consisted of sometimes angry, sometimes resigned predictions that fat women with dyed hair would soon take over Miss America.
Others imagined the competition taken over by trans women:
![Shun_SPICY 6 points 4 hours ago Calling it now, next winner will be fat genderqueer mess of a human being with a sociology degree. permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]Supreme_Dear_Leader 3 points 3 hours ago Micheal Moore??](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/0015.png?resize=546%2C364&ssl=1)
And then there was this exchange:
![shannon9473 40 points 7 hours ago I’m genuinely upset. Why are they taking everything feminine away from us? permalinkembedsavereportgive goldreply [–]That_SoundDTOM 24 points 6 hours ago You know why. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]shannon9473 9 points 6 hours ago Can you elaborate why? Thank you permalinkembedsaveparentreportgive goldreply [–]potatosurplus 20 points 4 hours ago They want to destroy masculine men and feminine women. They want a genderless society like in THX 1138 so they have subservient minions to rule over.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/000001.png?resize=580%2C770&ssl=1)
This dude had an even more alarming prediction:
While the denizens of TheDonald had the most to say about the pageant, don’t worry! The MGTOWs had some terrible opinions to share as well.
Such is the state of the discourse on Reddit today.
@Dalilama
Fair point.
Well, maybe Louis CK.
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.
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
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:
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’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!!!