Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker

by Kathleen Hale

  But the idea that participants in beauty-centric circuits crave some sexual satisfaction from the circus isn’t new. In Dr. David Reuben’s bestselling 1969 book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), he argues that pageant contestants bare their bodies for sexual gratification. “They usually have trouble attaining orgasm and never find much real pleasure in genital sex,” he explains. “They show off their breasts, hips, buttocks and a discreet outline of the vulva (through a bathing suit) to admiring men.” Essentially, Reuben says, the swimwear portion of the event gives participants titillation they can’t experience anywhere else because they are sexually dead inside. According to him, the vulvas they display are numb.

  So it’s strange that none of the former Miss Americas I talked to said anything about having an orgasm while walking in a bikini across a dangerously slick stage in five-inch heels, or while being crowned. Miss America 1998, Kate Shindle, author of the 2014 memoir Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain, told me girls have to psych themselves up for that portion of the evening by justifying it to themselves as an athletic event. “Many [of the girls] are frightened by having to walk down a runway in a swimsuit. Many perspire heavily, shake, gag, or even throw up,” Frank Deford wrote in his 1971 book, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America, known to amateur pageant historians as the “Miss America Bible.”

  According to one of the many moms I spoke with in the elevators and restrooms of the Claridge, “Girls stumble, twist ankles—it’s scary! My daughter goes into it very anxious. That stuff really hurts, and they see it hurt their friends.”

  She confided in me that one of the less reported and admittedly uncommon injuries occurs when the girls are trying to change out of their bikinis after Lifestyle and Fitness is over. Sometimes, if they’ve gotten a little overzealous with the butt glue, which is sprayed onto a contestant’s cheeks to keep her bikini bottom from slipping into her butt, they wind up tearing off skin.*

  During the brief moment that they were handed microphones and permitted to speak for sixty seconds, many of the girls that week discussed fitness. In keeping with the organization’s stance, a good number of them had taken up some form of health-related issue as their platform.

  Miss Georgia’s was a group called Healthy Children, Strong America.

  When asked to describe her commitment to the cause, she simply said, “I really try to live my platform and exercise all the time.”

  “What do you say about that butt?” a lady stranger asked, poking at my glossy program while Miss Georgia showcased her glistening, perfect body. She leaned over to turn my page, clutching her plastic cup, reeking of sticky-sweet juice and rum. I pictured a mailbox in place of her face and smiled at it.

  “What butt?” I said.

  “The black lady’s butt.”

  “Miss South Carolina?” I said.

  “It’s huge.” She turned abruptly to her boyfriend, or whoever he was, for confirmation, splashing purple drink on my lap. But he’d fallen fast asleep.

  It reminded me of a scene in Deford’s 1971 book, where a female judge complains of the entire ranking process getting thrown off by male judges, because they aren’t harsh enough—they don’t notice the same flaws that women see in other women.

  “The whole trouble with male judges,” the judge told Deford, “is that they can look right at a fanny and not even see the fanny overhang.”

  “Hey!”

  The drunk woman was back in my face, head lolling side to side. She jabbed again at my program, indicating Miss South Carolina.

  “I guess it’s pretty big, for a butt,” I heard myself say.

  In response, she told me I had pretty hair, which I thanked her for by saying something about Miss Kentucky’s cellulite.

  This was how we complimented each other, by denigrating the girls.*

  Blizzard joked throughout the night about how this year’s ninety-fifth anniversary of the pageant also marked the twentieth anniversary of the year she competed and lost. I could see the teleprompter from where I was sitting, so I knew she was straying constantly off script,** abruptly shifting from serious adulation for health and wellness to compulsively mentioning her age, holding out her microphone so that a girl could talk about her platform issue only to interrupt with some crack about the difference in their ages. She smiled the entire time, but after a while it started to look like a fear grin.

  “She needs to take a page out of Vanessa Williams’s book and straight-up disappear,” someone joked.

  Earlier that week, it had been announced that Miss America would welcome Vanessa Williams to the judges’ booth for the finals competition, which was a huge deal. After Williams became the first black woman ever to win Miss America in 1983, someone leaked photos of her doing a soft-core girl-on-girl pussy-licking modeling shoot, and the Miss America Organization forced her to resign. Even prior to the photos, Williams had been getting it from all sides: the diversity groups didn’t think she was “black enough”; the white supremacists found out where she lived and sent strange powders to her mother’s house. In the midst of public humiliation and censure, a weaker woman might have lain down under the boardwalk to be eaten by feral cats. Instead, Williams became famous for other things, like acting and doing that song, “Save the Best for Last,” which everyone forgets they know all the words to until it comes on in the car.

  As hours passed and more girls twirled batons onstage, the shit-talkers’ heckling started to feel inclusive, even womanly. Not participating in the catty commentary felt somehow unfriendly. And there’s nothing as ugly in a woman as unfriendliness.

  One lady nudged me and pointed to the stage. “Nose job, right?”

  I didn’t know whether she meant the contestant had gotten a nose job or needed one. Regardless, I agreed.

  “She needs a breast lift,” someone muttered—and then, later, “Either she’s got implants, or that’s a padded bra.”

  Enhancements like padded bras—called “falsies” in the past—were absolutely prohibited in early pageants. In fact, beautifying subterfuge was so taboo that in 1938, Miss California was rumored to have been blackballed in the finals because she “used too much makeup for the satisfaction of the judges” (she got first runner-up).

  But by now, the organization condoned what it used to condemn, choosing sponsors that would spray-tan the girls at no charge or provide them with free shaping swimwear. Padding, mascara, and hair extensions were all part of the game. As one of the maids who cleaned up after the contestants told me, “You go into their rooms, and it’s hair extensions! So many! Lined up on the floor small to big, like a staircase of hair!”

  Going into the preliminaries, I saw falsies as an act of empowerment that proved gender could be constructed. I agreed with the feminist scholar Susan Bordo, who said, “Although our cultural work as feminists can and should expose the oppressiveness of social institutions such as the Miss America Pageant system, the pleasure of participation, of decorating and shaping the body, can have subversive potential.”

  I personally owned padded bras. I’d even purchased the Kardashian-endorsed waist trainer, which allowed me to complement exquisitely contoured breasts with a 1950s cinched waist. My favorite shapers were a few thongs with reinforced crotches designed to obfuscate camel toe, made by the brand Camel No.

  But in Atlantic City, my falsies felt hot and itchy and uncomfortable—and I wondered what Dr. David Reuben would say about all my special underwear and corsets—what he might claim that I actually wanted.

  Instead of thinking too much about it, the next day I wriggled into a pair of Spanx with butt pads and returned to Boardwalk Hall for more Miss America. Every night, the audience stood to sing our national anthem. The American flag hanging on the rear wall of Boardwalk Hall was three times bigger than the jumbotrons hanging on either side of the stage—both of which were partially obscured by the overhead speakers so that during close-ups, the girls looked decapitated. It beca
me harder and harder to see them as people.

  Later that week I would decide to take a relaxing walk on the beach. I pried off my shoes and socks on the sandy wooden ramp leading to the shore. Sighing, I eased into the sand and promptly cut my foot on garbage.

  Mangy cats skulked from underneath the causeway, apparently smelling my blood.

  “Pussy above, pussy below!” a clever drunk man yelled, pointing between the Miss America posters decorating Boardwalk Hall and a sign telling tourists not to feed the cats.

  * * *

  According to the top brass at the Miss America Organization, winners always go on to do great things.

  In some cases, “great things” includes going to war.

  Miss Utah 2007 and Miss Kansas 2013 both enlisted before competing in the pageant (neither won the Miss America title), but apparently contestants enlist after winning, too.

  At first, I was surprised by how many veterans were mentioned among Dena Blizzard’s shout-outs to former Miss Americas, if only because competing in the system required total subscription to traditional feminine beauty standards, with which helmets and camouflage and machine guns clashed.

  Yet correlations between the beauty contest and war run deep. In her essay “I Was Miss Meridian 1985: Sororophobia, Kitsch, and Local Pageantry,” Donelle Ruwe, PhD, argues that by learning to think of beauty as a series of movements, outfits, and gender-enhancing prosthetics, contestants learn, perhaps even faster and more clearly than students in a gender-theory class, that gender is a construct. Simply winning Miss America can be seen as an almost martial triumph—a sort of Trojan-horse maneuver, whereby the winner manipulates the system by mirroring the same forces that oppress her.

  Like soldiers, contestants train for years in the hopes of deployment. Whoever wins Miss America wears her crown overseas to rally American troops, shedding her own identity to become someone for everyone. Deford refers to Miss America’s year with the title as a “moral crusade” on behalf of the organization and to Miss America herself as a “War Cheerleader.” Even the bikini she wears to win her title is named for the Marshall Island of Bikini, where, during World War II, the United States secretly tested its atomic bomb.*

  Natural beauty and poise are myths created by men. The truth is that, like martial arts, both take time to master. In an interview with Deford quoted in his book, Miss America 1948, BeBe Shopp, says of her win, “I just figured if you could learn to be a brain, you could learn to be a woman.”

  Becoming the perfect woman requires training; you learn to wave and smile and forget yourself—just so. Winning Miss America, like winning a war, requires an individual to adopt a specific competitive identity, often at the expense of her real one.

  There’s a part in Deford’s book about Jacque Mercer (the Miss America winner who wrote a book about smiling at mailboxes) that reads:

  Each year as she grew up, her father had given Jacque a battery of standard personality tests. The development of her character was charted consistently, and in the year before she became Miss America, her indices of drive, ambition, and self-confidence had risen so high that they appeared to have soared off the curve. She took the same tests following her year as Miss America, and found that those three characteristics had been shattered. Her best had been broken.

  Mercer won, and lost herself.

  * * *

  “How old are you?” the woman sitting next to me asked. We knew each other now, not by name, but because our tickets sat us together every night. (Embarrassed by the low audience turnout, the organization had started hustling tourists on the boardwalk with free tickets. It had become impossible to switch seats.)

  “Thirty,” I said proudly.

  Since the age of twelve, I’d always rounded up. And if turning thirty was a socially constructed, antifeminist preoccupation, why should I be afraid to say I was thirty when I was actually slightly younger?

  “You look older,” the woman said.

  I reminded myself that at twelve, I would have taken this as a compliment.

  That night, rather than wander the boardwalk, with its feral cats and lurid strangers, I went straight to my hotel room, collapsed on the bed, and snow-angeled the covers, relieved that after the next day’s Show Me Your Shoes Parade, I would attend the final night of competition, and then I could go home, where my husband lived. I missed him. A few weeks earlier, we’d gone to one of those restaurants that specialize in fresh seafood and has tanks full of live lobsters and crabs to prove it. One of the crabs was so huge and terrifying, we spent most of the night talking about how it belonged in the Museum of Natural History behind a plaque designating it as a monster. While we shit-talked, it started to crawl across the bodies of other crabs and shellfish, and we watched in stunned horror as it curled one bony arm over the lip of the tank and managed to raise its eyes (were those eyes?) about an inch out of the water.

  It was trying to pull itself out of the tank.

  I gripped my husband’s hand, simultaneously hoping for and rooting against the crab’s escape. It struggled for what felt like hours before losing its grip and falling backward onto the depressed lobsters below. I stood abruptly, but my husband pulled me back into my seat. “Don’t you dare try to save it,” he said. He knows me better than anyone.

  Now, in my Claridge hotel room, I curled into a fetal position, imagining a crab version of the giant Atlantic City pretzels I’d been eating sliding its bready limbs under my skin. I took deep breaths, willing my metabolism to destroy the monster.

  All night, I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t feminist to feel fat.

  * * *

  The Miss America Organization describes the Show Me Your Shoes Parade as an opportunity for contestants to celebrate “the spirit of their home state through costume and one-of-a-kind wearable handmade art-shoe creations. Floats, marching bands, dancers, twirling groups, and a variety of other amazing parade groups will join the fun!”

  That year’s parade took place in the pouring rain. Marching bands and banner-draped convertibles crawled down the boardwalk to avoid skidding. Pageant contestants perched on the backseats waved and smiled and twisted one leg midair without rest, somehow managing to hold their toes at a perfect forty-five-degree angle to their faces the whole time. Luckily their makeup was waterproof.

  All around me, people praised the girls for acting like they weren’t cold. When little toddler pageant girls marched past with dead expressions—because when you’re that young you smile when you’re happy, and there’s nothing happy about being cold and wet and wearing itchy sequins—the women in my midst tried to rile them up, shouting, “C’mon, girls! Get it!”

  I remember one time when I was that age, standing in a poufy-sleeved Easter dress that I hated because it was lavender and I wanted to wear a tuxedo like my ventriloquist dummy. My dad was taking a photo and said, “Smile, pumpkin!” But as soon as he prompted me, I forgot how to do it. Trying to remember, I pictured a cartoon, the way the teeth line up on top of each other, and arranged my top and bottom teeth that way, widening my eyes. My dad looked horrified. “What are you doing?” he asked. He thought I was angry with him, lashing out. After that I learned how to do it right, smiling all the time so as not to upset people, and by high school I’d won myself a solid reputation for being stupid (people loved me!), and permanent nasolabial folds that made me resemble my talking puppet.

  By the time Miss Virginia passed by, the rain was coming down so hard that my sneakers and socks were squelching, and I could feel my toes shriveling into frozen raisins. Virginia’s curls were collapsing, but everyone cheered because she pretended it wasn’t happening. I went to a place in my head that was warm, like Virginia in July.

  The sound of booing interrupted my reverie.

  I looked up and saw a car approaching with its retractable top cranked up against the rain. Miss Wisconsin, from my home state, passed by us, guarded from the downpour, trying to hold her foot up to the passenger-side window to show us her shoes.
She waved at us from behind the glass. People booed louder and louder.

  “Now, that’s just ridiculous,” the woman shouted from under her golf umbrella. “We’re out here in the rain, aren’t we?”

  “Poor sportsmanship.”

  “Not even trying.”

  “Did you see her frown?”

  But she looks so cramped and uncomfortable, I wanted to say. Isn’t that enough?

  Instead, I booed.

  I was the loudest of them all.

  * * *

  People love to boo at Miss America. A few years ago on Last Week Tonight, the cartoonishly incredulous John Oliver and a team of fact-checkers went after the Miss America Organization’s 2014 claim that it had made $45 million available in academic scholarships. As a registered nonprofit, Miss America has to file public tax forms, so Oliver and the fact-checkers dug those up from 2012 and found that they showed an annual national scholarship expenditure of only $482,000. “A mere forty-four and a half million dollars short!” Oliver chortled to the camera, nearly choking on his own alarm.

  I’m not sure if the Miss America Organization saw Oliver’s bit, but the next year’s official program quoted only $303,000 in scholarships. Perhaps the higher-ups were trying to deflect attention from recent rumors, based on other tax returns, that its current executive director, Sam Haskell III—a pink, sticky-looking man—had paid himself twice, as a boss and an employee, making away with hundreds of thousands of Miss America dollars over several years.

  Ultimately, John Oliver and his team were depressed to find that the organization’s biggest claim to fame—that it was the number one provider of scholarships to women in the world—was actually true.

  Say what you will about Miss America. But as of 2015 it was one of a tiny number of organizations awarding smart, talented, hardworking ladies the lump sum of money needed for college.

  * * *

  “She looked fat in those photos,” someone remarked as we waited in the dark for the finals to start.