The Beauty Pageant Culture

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how beauty pageants define gender, hierarchy, and power. The paper contends that, despite growing resentments to a male-imposed version of femininity, women in America are influenced by a wide range of powerful cultural messages that serve to define unrealistic expectations of what women should look like and how they should act. The paper explores the Miss America, Miss Universe, and Miss World pageants.

From the Paper:

"Data for the winners of the Miss America competition from 1921 to 1986 (when the pageant stopped collecting the data) were analyzed by Freese and Meland; these researchers found that simple correlations between WHR and a linear measure of the time of pageant victory show that the WHRs of Miss American winners have changed over time. The correlation coefficients indicate that the WHR Miss America winners have decreased over time (r =.-55, p < .001) and those of Playboy centerfold models have increased over time (r =.46, p < .001) (Freese & Meland, 2002, p. 135). On the one hand, the authors say these results could reasonably be assumed to mean that this is evidence of an invariance in the underlying preference over time; the opposing trends, while important, could merely reflect idiosyncrasies of employing self-reported Playboy and Miss America measurements as measures of indicators of American male preferences for specific gender characteristics in the opposite sex at a given point in time. In other words, they say, because the trends are in opposite directions, they can be thought of as canceling each other out, allowing the conclusion that reflected WHR preferences have effectively been temporally invariant despite evidence of change in both samples (Freese & Meland, 2002, p. 136)."

More papers on The Beauty Pageant Culture:

• Term Paper # 101191 : "Beauty Contests"
• Argumentative Essay # 131140 : "Contested Meanings and the Miss America Pageant"
• Article Review # 117432 : "The Beauty Myth"

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