A few days ago, trying to understand Trump’s becoming President, I searched for videos making fun of American stupidity. And I came across this: Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww).
The contestant from South Carolina is presented with this: “A recent poll has shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S on a world map. Why do you think this is?”
And the contestant replies: “I personally believe that U. S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education, like such as South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should—our education over here in the U.S should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children.”
At first, I was going to call her out for being an idiot. And an embarrassment.
(The contest is for women only and so the likelihood, among stupid people, will be to generalize from those women to all women. True, intelligent men aren’t embarrassed by meatheads, but they—the intelligent men—haven’t been struggling as a group to be allowed as a group, to vote, to be admitted to university, to be fairly paid, to be taken seriously, etc, etc.)
But then I realized that it was a Miss Teen competition. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t even deliver a prepared speech to just a classroom full of my peers unless I had notes. So I thought I should cut her some slack.
I also realized that the first part of her answer was actually pretty good: I would’ve gone right to ‘They didn’t pay attention in school and now they’re ignorant fools.’ Schools not having the required materials, maps, wouldn’t ‘ve occurred to me.
And I realized that I was less annoyed by her subsequent non sequitur word salad than by her prefatory “I personally believe … “. The weight she put on “personally” was no doubt intended, though perhaps unconsciously, to put her response firmly in the realm of the subjective and so make it immune to evaluation, let alone criticism, and oh-the-horror disagreement. As in there’s ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth’. Nonsense. There’s ‘my experience’ and ‘your experience’ and even ‘my interpretation’ and ‘your interpretation’, but there is only ‘the’ truth. If ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth’ are in conflict, one of us is WRONG. (Should I have given a trigger alert there? ‘Wrong’ is the new blasphemy, it seems.)
The weight put on “believe” is understood to guarantee the same immunity. Everyone has a right to their own opinions (or beliefs), but that doesn’t mean everyone’s opinions (or beliefs) are correct. (Or even unassailable.)
I personally believe in Santa Claus.
I was also annoyed that such stupidity is granted even 15 seconds of microphone time—access to millions. Oh what actually intelligent women would give for such an audience! What we would say!
And, of course, I was annoyed by the competition itself. I thought we’d done away with beauty pageants fifty years ago. Apparently not.
So instead of calling out Miss South Carolina, I’m going to call out the competition organizers: if you’re going to have a competition for beauty, don’t expect the contestants to also be intelligent.
Expecting ‘pretty’ to be ‘smart’ justifies the expectation that ‘smart’ be ‘pretty’. And although we don’t (yet) expect the girls who enter the chess competitions to be pretty, hiring committees worldwide—for news anchors to secretaries to school teachers to waitresses to lawyers—consider the appearance of female applicants more than that of male applicants. We know this.
Yes, in the case of male applicants, height is often a consideration (go figure), especially for positions of power, but when was the last time the shape of a man’s legs was relevant?
(Final note: women, by putting your legs on display, you enable the relevance of their shape.)
