Hi Everyone!  I'm just picking up with my blog where I left off last year.  I had an email discussion with someone from this class today, and I was inspired to write about something I saw on Facebook. Ah yes, Facebook can give us such good fodder for blog posts!  :-)

One of my friends posted today and asked, "Does anyone watch the Miss America Pageant anymore?"  It made me think about how far we HAVEN'T come, in so many ways.  I must admit that you will see a bit of a feminist theme in a lot of my posts.  I'm sure some of what I say would also be appropriate for a Women's Studies class, or maybe even more appropriate, but I think, if we're discussing gender role development, it's important to look at the socialization piece.

The Miss America Pageant, to me, is pretty exploitative of women.  It is touted as a "scholarship pageant," and the winners do indeed win scholarships, but to me, that's a very small part of what it is. 

I grew up in Denton, and two of my childhood friends won the Miss America Pageant back in the 1970s.  They did have to have a talent, but the talent was such a small part of the pageant.  Mostly, it was a "beauty" pageant, and I remember both of these young women going over a complete makeover (one more than the other), and their talent was marginal, at best. 

When my elder daughter was about three or four, one of my then husband's friends saw Courtney's picture and insisted that she should be in a pageant.  We thought about it, and we succumbed to the pressure.....ONCE!  We invested about $300 in a pageant dress, shoes, hair bow, entry fee, etc.  And back in 1987, that was a lot of money for a young married couple with a small child.  It might have even been more than that.  I don't really remember.

But when we went to the hotel where the pageant was being held, we had no idea what we were in store for!  There were "stage mothers" who CLEARLY had done this for awhile, and they had their little girls all made up, with rollers in their hair, etc.  I remember one of them saying to their little girls, "Pretty feet and hands, pretty feet and hands!"  There were mothers and grandmothers in the dressing area, and many of the little girls were crying or whining, and the mothers were losing their patience.

We had no makeup or rollers. Courtney's hair was (is) naturally curly, so we didn't really have to worry, but, OMG!  what a production this was.  And the poor little girls! I could only feel sorry for them!  You've probably seen some of the reality shows and/or Dateline shows or something, where they've shown clips of some of these pageants.  It was horrifying! 

That was our one and only experience with a pageant.  We had a younger daughter six and a half years later, and the thought never crossed our minds with her.  Never, never, never would we ever subject our child to that again.

But anyway, back to Miss America.....well, I guess the little girl pageants are a part of all that.....I thought we might have come farther than we have, when it comes to exploiting and objectifying women.  And I guess there aren't as many people who watch it as there once were, but apparently there are enough to warrant their having it televised nationally!  And one of my younger daughter's bridesmaids competed in the Miss America pageant last year. 

I will talk about Hooter's and Twin Peaks another time!  :-)  I won't bore you any longer with my commentary.  I could go on......  :-)

Dr. G