Sara Milliken, 23, was named “Miss Alabama” when she was selected by judges as the #1 beauty in the regional semi-finals of the National American Miss pageant. I find myself at a loss to explain or analyze this. Beauty pageants were always odd, and in 2024 they are anachronistic ghosts of long-dead cultural attitudes and tastes that never made much sense.
So end them, for heaven’s sake. If they have to stoop to stunts like calling a morbidly obese woman the most beautiful woman on the stage, what’s the point?
In response to Sara’s victory and the entirely predictable tsunami of ridicule it has attracted on social media, various apologists have raved about Sarah’s “inner beauty.” Okay, then call them “inner beauty pageants,” have all the contestants wear burlap sacks instead of gowns, ban make-up and styled hair—heck, maybe tell contestants they can’t bathe for a moth—and stop pretending that by any American cultural norm or standard a grossly obese young woman heading for a heart attack before she’s 40 is “beautiful.” And exactly what message does this silly result send to young women? Traditional beauty pageants were condemned for promoting eating disorders. What does this kind of pageant promote?
The political-correctness mandates suffocating the news media into ludicrousness was on special display with this story. The Daily Mail’s intellectually dishonest reporting was typical: Sarah was a “plus-size”winner. (Sarah is eye-poppingly fat, making Lizzo seem trim.) Social media commenters who criticized her weight were “trolls.” (They were legitimately questioning the result of the “beauty” contest.)
Scoring in the pageant, as explained on its website, is based on “personality, confidence and communication.” “Braces, glasses, skin problems, varying heights, weights and appearances, are all a part of creating the special and unique individual that you are and that we want to celebrate,’ the website states. It might as well have included “major birth defects” and lizard people.
Got it. This is a personality contest, and the organizers and sponsors are falsely packaging it in the guise of a beauty pageant in an audacious bait and switch. That’s unethical, and all involved deserve every bit of criticism they get.
Ethics Alarms 
The number one criteria must have been left out. The winning contestant will be the one that is closest to the shape of the outline of the state of Alabama.
I think she’d more accurately described as “Miss Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.”
“All the girls like her.”
This is Alabama. Well, Maryland just said, “Hold my Beer.” Yep:
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1798877068681474086
jvb
Beat me to it. Maryland is California east. My question is why we describe people as Cambodian-American or some other country. If you were born here you are an American and if you are naturalized you renounce allegiance to other countries. If you are neither born nor naturalized you are not an American.
In other matters our beloved state just raised vehicle registration fees 72% and then allowed us to pay half the period at a time.
I no longer find the beauty pageants meaningful. Maryland just elected their first trans-woman.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/bailey-anne-becomes-first-trans-woman-to-be-crowned-miss-maryland/ar-BB1nHIbA
Perfect. A guy is better at doing the things required to win a beauty pageant than women are. Tells you something about the skills involved in beauty pageants.
“Tells you something about the skills involved in beauty pageants.”
Or the “judges” grading the skills.
Oh, I’m going to assume she really was the best at being a beauty pageant contestant. They are surely learned skills. Of course, that’s where the satire of the whole industry arises.
He wants world peace. He hates broccoli but wants to give peas a chance.
HE also supports whirled peas.
jvb
of course the Babylon Bee is all over it…
https://babylonbee.com/news/at-this-point-nation-just-happy-pageant-winner-is-an-actual-woman
So let’s see, men have figured out how to dominate women’s swimming, women’s volleyball, women’s weightlifting, and now women’s beauty pageants…and many women are totally cool with it. In fact, some of them are aghast that men think this is bad.
You almost can’t make this level of “stupid” up.
Joel; once you stop expecting it to make sense, it makes perfect sense.
PWS
Next year perhaps the pageant organizers could add a Sumo Wrestling segment to the competition. It might increase viewership.
Maybe they thought a morbidly obese woman would better represent the people of Alabama.
Ouch. Actually, I’m going to guess there are legions of (old school) beauty queen types in the sororities throughout Alabama colleges and universities.
I am embarrassed for this young woman, and I wonder if it was her idea to enter the contest or if someone put her up to it. But I guess if it makes her — what? — happy? then who am I to criticize? The whole thing just seems like an ethics abomination.
I have read numerous comments on other sites regarding this woman. I find all of them disgusting.
My take is that she entered and competed against others. That should be the end of it unless you want to question the judging. If you are judging the judges then we should admit that we have these pageants for the purpose of objectifying women under the guise of it being a scholarship pageant. I will not deny that obesity is an unhealthy condition. So too is trying to force women to be a size western societies deem “beautiful. I believe it was Madonna that never wanted to be fat like Maryilyn Monroe.
The commentary denigrating her for her size is far more unethical than her winning. The nasty comments showcase how mean people can be.
She’s deluded. It’s a public event, and by its genre is regarded as a beauty contest, like all the other “Miss X” pageants. If someone presumes, in public, to be something he or she is not by any stretch of the imagination, than that person has consented to the inevitable reaction such a pretension engenders. In no universe is a woman so grotesquely obese “beautiful.” Was it cruel for people to point out that, for example, the infamous Senjaya on American Idol, the contestant who couldn’t sing a lick but kept getting passed through to the next week, was terrible? OK, let’s assume that the woman winning “Miss Alabama” is mentally ill, or had a really wild case of reverse dysmorphia. Are we supposed to share that delusion with her? Is the whole culture supposed to turn on its head and decide that this kind of obesity is “beauty” in the US in 2024?
I appreciate the compassion, but…seriously?
“Is the whole culture supposed to turn on its head and decide that this kind of obesity is ‘beauty’ in the US in 2024?”
Perhaps Gillette’s pioneering ANNA should…um…WEIGH IN…
PWS
Presumably beauty pageants began losing popularity among the feminist crowd for quite obviously the problems they present and I would also assume then that their popularity was maintained in “conservative” circles more or less.
Without going into a very long discussion, beauty pageants really shouldn’t have been a “conservative thing”. Even the Baptist convention published a statement against them in 1926, 2 years after the first miss America:
““WHEREAS, The purity and sanctity of the home depends upon a proper respect for and safeguarding of our girls; and
WHEREAS, “Beauty contests” and so-called “bathing revues” are evil and evil only, and tend to lower true and genuine respect for womanhood, emphasizing and displaying only purely physical charm above spiritual and intellectual attainments,
THEREFORE, We, the Southern Baptist Convention do deplore and condemn all such contests and revues.”
Presumably now, the beauty pageants have probably been losing popularity in general. And as all things go, make a play for a crowd that has notionally hated you; go woke and try to carve off what organizations think the growing culture of America is.
The arbitrary selection of this contestant was a play for the growing anti-culture in our society built around falsehood, ugliness, and badness.
When I was a kid, the televised “Miss America” pageant was a big deal. Winning was often an entry into larger stardom. It was the popularity of that show that made spin-offs like “Miss USA” profitable. But “Miss America” started seeming weirder than ever by the 1970s. Ratings dropped, Bert Parks died, and efforts to save it just made the thing more obviously a dead pageant walking. Then the child beauty pageants, which were always sick, began taking flack.
I’m amazed that the pageants lasted as long as they did.
I was raised in a southern baptist family.
My sister one year really really wanted to see the miss America pageant. So we watched it.
It was the only year and it felt all manners of awkward. My sister never insisted on watching it again.
I never understood the dynamic because I didn’t care.
Thank God for my tolerant but protective parents.