Mixed Message

Remember all the protests that beauty pageants aren't about beauty, but about so much more than that? Guess we've all learned that it is more than that: it's about sexually exploiting young women who are in it to win it by taking borderline porno photos that fix the pageant squarely into the realm of best body takes all. Trump's justification for the lingerie spread hyping the Miss USA pageant is that his show is on TV this weekend, while the other pageants aren't, breaking down the morality of the photo shoot to one word: money.

The price we are paying, however, for our overt emphasis on physical appearance and sexual attraction is too high. Just ask any woman who has ever been inappropriately touched or sexually violated how it feels to know that it's not about who I am, but about how someone thinks I look. Just ask anyone who has had sexually explicit photos released to the media. Just ask anyone who made a sex tape that came out from behind closed doors. Just ask anyone who was illegally taped behind the closed and locked door of a hotel room.

Today's youth knows that nothing matters as much as appearance. If a child's body is not aligned with what the media determines is desirable, young women can become obsessed to the point of doing physical harm to themselves. It's one thing to starve or exercise one's self into unnatural thinness and physical harm, but to pay to have a surgeon completely redesign one's body indicates how deeply imbedded a person's self-image is and how easily damaged it can be by the media. Heidi Montag is symptomatic of what's gone horribly wrong: she paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to alter her appearance to conform to what she thinks is the way she should look, including distorting her body with huge breast implants that take the focus off the person inside the cosmetic surgery. Don't see me: focus on my huge breast implants and then pick me to star in your next movie.

I do not totally disagree with what Elizabeth Hasselbeck said about the Dancing With the Stars contestants: it is not about the dancing, but about the "sexiness" of the performance. Listen to the judges' comments, especially the male judges, who slather over the scantily clad female dancers and then pontificate that it's a "dance" contest. When Carrie Anne makes a comment that a dance was hot, hot, hot -- the male judges look askance at her, as if her comment is offensive, but Carrie Anne's comments are always about the dancing. We cannot pretend that anyone watches the show for the dancing, but for the potential costume malfunction, the spur-of-the-moment sexual relationships that allegedly develop as a result of working together, the overt sexiness of the performances. If it were truly about the dancing, the costumes would blend into the background, rather than take center stage as the reason for the judge's scores.

And if we're watching for the costumes, for the sexual tension between the performers, for the emphasis on anyone's "jiggly parts," the next logical step is that there are those who will step over the line between a TV show and the implied entitlement that what is on the show is available to anyone who wants it.

A long, long time ago, I shared my perspective that the scanty costumes and the sexually explicit and provocative moves of the high school dance team were ... inappropriate. After all, a high school is not an adult Las Vegas showroom, and, in my opinion, there is a different level of appropriateness depending on the age of the performer and the performance venue. At another school, I was totally offended by a performance from the dance team that appeared on stage wearing scanty sexy lingerie and bumped and grinded their way through "He had it coming," a song that did not just display over-the-top sexuality, but glorified justified homocide.

In both cases, I was accused of being too prudish, but I stand by my observations today. Teenagers are 24/7 hormonal surges, so feeding the urges with costumes and performances designed to display the female form sexually is not appropriate. Teenagers need to be guided through age-appropriate awareness, not thrust into sexual competition with Playmate role models and home-grown sex tapes! Even the youngest children participating on cheer squads and school dance teams are slapping their boooties, thrusting their pelvises, and shaking their jiggly bits, moves that are questionable at best and age inappropriate in many cases.

Women in this country have more public rights than in most other countries, but instead of keeping the standard for women at the highest levels, we have become no better than the women who cannot see beyond the public display of their sexuality to define themselves. No, we don't need to wear burkas and cover our bodies, but we do need to regain a perspective on public displays of far too much skin in questionable venues. If a beauty pageant is going to be about global issues, about scholarship, about the well-rounded woman, then why does the focus of the publicity need to be on scantily-clad bedroom photos of young women in barely there lingerie?