Miss America: the beauty pageant that places women from different states in a competition based on body type and aesthetics. Oops, I meant the world's largest scholarship provider for women that claims to give away roughly 45 million dollars in scholarship money.
The whole basis of the competition is a major ethical issue. It is placing looks and trivial details such as swimsuits—or now "athlesiure" as the category has been renamed—over academic ability, while simultaneously treating the two categories as though they are of the same importance and can be judged on the same manner. Miss America reinforces the idea that if you are beautiful—according to their beauty standards, you are also smart but if you are not conventionally attractive, then you are not intelligent either. This type of thinking is extremely damaging.
The exposure and hype that the competition receives only spreads this harmful message.
Now, if you're not necessarily opposed to Miss America based solely on its ethical implications, the money may just be an issue for you. The organization boasts an insanely large amount of money awarded, but the way they declare this money is essentially fraud. They add up the money for each possible winner and claim that as the whole amount. For example, if the scholarship was $4,000 and there were ten contestants then they would say the competition was for $40,000 worth of scholarships. This isn't a mistake but is just straight up wrong. It's misleading and allows them to act as if they are giving out a lot more aid than what they actually are. But, even with the skewed and falsified statistics the organization is still accurate in claiming that they are the biggest scholarship program that is exclusively for women which is an entirely different dilemma.
The pageant has a plethora of other issues besides their questionable ethics and financial discrepancies. The contestants are asked difficult questions and expected to answer them with only 20 seconds. The questions can range from thoughts on education reform to how to deal with ISIS. How can a competition that claims to be about helping scholars pay for their schooling expect those in the competition to answer complex and interesting questions in such a short amount of time? In actuality, the competition spends the least amount of time on the only part that could be seen as showing scholarly ability.
The Miss America competition is not at all what it claims to be. It promotes the idea that a certain body is ideal and that it is more important than scholarly ability. It also lies in the figures that the organization releases and does so with reckless abandon. The competition places women on a stage to be judged and then paraded around to show what all other American women should strive to be.
