Photo courtesy of AP/Miss America
When I watched the newly crowned 2012 Miss America, Wisconsin’s opera-singing Laura Kaeppeler, ascend her throne (?) last week, for some reason the first thing that popped into my head was the time and financial commitment, as well as the personal sacrifices the contestants and their families must have made over the years to just reach that moment. Certainly the benefits must outweigh the costs, I thought.
Writer and sociologist Hilary Levey Friedman discovered while researching her senior thesis at Harvard in 2000, there are many reasons why children and their parents enter the world of beauty pageants:
A common thread we discover is that the competition serves as a platform where participants (or in some cases, the parents of the participants) learn and cultivate characteristics that contribute to a future track record of success. As it turns out the reasons are no different than those of us who are shuttling our kids from school to music lessons to sports practices and so on, day after day after day. Could it be that the path that Laura Kaeppeler took to the top is not all that different from an elite athlete, musician, scientist or even those of us who want to be considered the best at what we do?“Parents with higher incomes and education beyond high school often cite teaching a child how to deal with competition as a main reason for entering pageants. Many of them want their daughters to be doctors, dentists, or to have professional careers, Levey discovered in interviews.
Moms on lower socioeconomic levels also think competition is healthy. "My daughter looks like Barbie," one said. "I tell her to exploit it. This is your life; you take what you have and run with it."
A high percentage of parents said they enter their children into beauty contests so they can meet others. "Pageants help my daughter make friends," one mother noted.
Other parents put their children into the competitions because they themselves found them to be helpful. "Pageants were a positive experience for me," another mom commented. "I became less shy, learned about public speaking, gained job interview skills, and got rid of a heavy Maine accent."
Several years ago, a reader questioned me about including beauty pageants as a node in G.3. I explained that in any sport or profession, only a few reach an elite status. Even when one puts in the time and sacrifices that are necessary, there are no guarantees that one will reach the pinnacle of their profession. At its core, G.3 is simply a stage where its participants and practitioners have an opportunity to measure themselves against the countless variety of types and levels of competitors in a countless number of nodes. What makes G.3 great is that it pits the best from across all its nodes against each other. But, for those of us who may never reach the peak, G.3 can still help make us better at what we currently do, love to do or it can give us new exciting possibilities to pursue. In that sense, the Miss America Pageant is an ideal G.3 node.
There will always be detractors who regard true competitions as only those that severely test the physical or mental will of its participants. But, therein lies the beauty of G.3. Although a more nuanced view of what is an elite competition will certainly enhance the enjoyment of G.3 as a participant or aficionado, it isn’t required to enjoy the many other aspects of G.3 that may better suit those who have a very specific definition of “competition”.
