Lessons From Miss America
March 2, 2009 • By Sarah Delia, The Breeze
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Kirsten Haglund’s grace, dedication go far deeper than the ‘beauty queen’ stereotype
HARRISONBURG, Va. — To me, the concept of a beauty pageant is a non sequitur. Sure, contests like Miss America are based on a scholarship, but at the end of the day women still have to strut around in a two-piece bathing suit to win an academic award. Plus, the girls who participate in pageants are the perfect cheerleader types from high school — the ones who never had a misplaced strand of hair or blemish on their face. They represent an unrealistic body image and set an impossible standard for young girls to live up to.
That was the preconceived notion I had of women who competed in contests like Miss America. Before I interviewed Miss America 2008, Kirsten Haglund, who visited JMU on Feb. 20 to speak about her struggle with anorexia during high school, I had serious reservations about the message the Miss America competition gives to young women.
Several of my friends found it ironic that I was going to sit down and interview a real beauty queen. After all, don’t I usually write about issues pertaining to the everyday woman? Don’t I produce and host a female talk show on WXJM? To one friend, I was betraying my feminist intellect by talking to someone they viewed as superficial.
But when Haglund sat down to do an on-air interview at the WXJM radio station, I was completely baffled and stunned to learn that she was not only beautiful, but more importantly, she had a brain. Haglund was nothing but poised, sincere and well aware of the negative stereotypes people have about beauty queens.
Going into the interview, I wanted nothing more than to grill her with hard questions to see if I could trip her up. I asked her: as a person who had struggled with the media and body perfection, what did she think about girls who are disempowered by beauty pageants, which often create body image issues? Haglund completely turned the negative question into a positive answer, stating that she used the opportunity to inspire young girls because she herself had an eating disorder long before she entered the pageant world.
Because Haglund wasn’t a bona-fide pageant girl, it allowed me to better connect with her. “I ran for Miss Michigan because of the scholarship… I needed the money. I had never competed in anything like that before,” she said. “After I won that, I realized that I had a chance to win.”
Although Haglund is just 20 years old, she’s traveled, met a ton of celebrities, and has been able to speak to young women and men about the dangers of anorexia. Most impressively, she lobbied Congress to pass a bill that requires health insurance companies to financially help those who seek treatment for eating disorders. The thing I enjoyed the most about Haglund is that even though her reign as Miss America has just ended, she’s still going to continue to travel to schools and anywhere that will have her, to speak out on the dangers of eating disorders.
It wasn’t that Haglund completely changed my mind about beauty pageants, but she did make me admit that the stigma I had against her going into the interview was wrong. And that negativity I had toward her was based solely on the notion that she was a beauty queen and would therefore look down upon me. This mindset, I realize looking back at the whole thing, was about as unfeminist as one could get. I was attacking another woman because I felt like she stood for beauty and nothing else. It turned out that I was the one passing judgment on someone who I actually had a lot in common with.
After my friends found out I went through with the interview, most of them admitted how cool they thought it was. Some of them still couldn’t stop rolling their eyes, even as I expressed to them how eye-opening it was to speak with her. I, in turn, rolled my eyes back at their unwillingness to hear me out.
My favorite part of speaking with Haglund was at the end, once the mics were turned off and we were just chatting like friends. She complimented my dress, and I gushed over her black overcoat. As she was about to leave, I told her once again how happy I was to have met her and how impressed I was with her dedication to her platform.
“It’s good to know that you’re a real person,” I said awkwardly. “You know, that you’re not some kind of beauty queen robot.” I meant this as a compliment.
Instead of moving toward the nearest exit as fast as she possibly could from my strange comment, she replied with a smile, “Thanks, I know what you mean.”
I still don’t understand the necessity of having a swimsuit section part of a competition that is based on personality and talent. But I must say from my time interviewing this very mature 20-year-old, there’s so much more that’s going on behind the graceful wave and sparkling crown.
Sarah Delia is a senior English and art history major and programming director of WXJM radio.
Contact Sarah Delia at deliasg@jmu.edu
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3 Responses to “Lessons From Miss America”
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Good for you for having the courage to look beyond the stereotype. It is too easy to categorize people - to prejudge them - based on the groups to which they belong.
Sometimes, it seems like we have special permission to stereotype others, if we ourselves are stereotyped.
It is so gleefully fun to attack pageant girls. So pretty, so virtuous, so much fun to put them in their place. It is almost a sport.
But it is woefully wrong.
Why do we feel we have this liscence? Perhaps because anyone that claims or seeks virtue or achievement is a target?
Why do we let Tommy Lee (rocker) of the hook, and attack Kathy Lee (Gifford)?
While that successfully pines to something base in all of us, it is neither valid nor right.
You broke free from that low-road cadence. You sought true truth.
And found it.
Good for you, and good for us. I respect you even more, and I appreciate your writings.
Like you Sarah, I didn’t know what to expect when I interviewed twenty-two former Miss Americas for my newly published book, Pretty Smart: Lessons from our Miss Americas. I found, just as you did, that these women turn out to be not just pretty, but pretty smart. In person, they shatter the “it’s only a beauty contest” perception with their intelligence, thoughfulness, poise and eloquence.
Many people don’t see beyond the swimsuit competition. They think that you can’t be beautiful and smart. This complicated mix of beauty and brains has always been a contradiction in American society, which often dismisses the possibility of being both.
In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the Miss America Organization had a liberal feminist agenda years before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, promoting higher education for women starting in the 1940s when women in aprons were more the norm than women in business suits.
I applaud you for being willing to admit your own now debunked stereotype of who these women really are. Kirsten isn’t an anomaly. Her down to earth and gracious demeanor is representative of all the women I talked with. My interviews like yours, turned into deeply felt conversations between two women. My life is richer for having gotten to know them.
I have to say, that as a journalist shouldn’t you be interviewing people you disagree with? Even if you know going into it that you will disagree with them, isn’t this ok?
I don’t understand why your friends would think you were “betraying [your] feminist intellect by talking to someone they viewed as superficial”.
After all, Barbara Walters did not become a Communist by interviewing Fidel Castro.