The Opportunity Cost of Miss America

I have mostly (or completely) used this blog to write about my life here in Mozambique and I am halfway through a new post about working with some Dutch journalists on a story about illegal logging, but I need to take a quick detour.

I need to talk about women for a moment. It’s not a total detour from my life here in Moz, because the situation of girls and women here is always on my mind, and it frequently makes me reflect on the state of women back in the US and around the world. Almost every week in our discussions in English Club the topic ends up coming back around to gender equality. Maybe because it is a subject that I hold near and dear, or maybe because all other social or human rights-related issues are inextricably linked to the status of women in society. I’m biased, but I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

Anyway, to detour from Moz for the moment I need to talk about Facebook. For the last couple of days, my newsfeed has been completely full of Emma Watson’s speech at the UN as the Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women. Actually, there has been a lot about women’s rights in my newsfeed lately. All together, they have been making me think a lot about the issue in new and different ways and I need to react to a few of them.

First, Emma Watson. For those who haven’t seen it, she gave a wonderful 12-minute speech to launch “He for She,” a campaign that emphasizes the need for men to also take up the cause of gender equality.  She starts out talking about her own experiences: “My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day.” And goes on to hit a number of crucial points about the current state of women and girls in the world: “the reality is that if we do nothing it will take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. 15.5 million girls will be married in the next 16 years as children. And at current rates it won’t be until 2086 before all rural African girls will be able to receive a secondary education.”

But a major focus of the speech is men:

I’ve seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by society despite my needing his presence as a child as much as my mother’s. I’ve seen a young man suffering from mental illness unable to ask for help for fear it would make him less of a man – in fact in the UK suicide is the biggest killer of men between 20-49…I’ve seen men made fragile and insecure by a distorted sense of what constitutes male success…

If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled. Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong. It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum instead two opposing sets of ideals. If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we just are - we can all be freer.

Amen. Seriously. The binary definitions of gender we frequently establish leave a lot of people feeling insecure when they don’t fit neatly into the accepted box. I’m not even talking about transgender people, but those men who identify as male, but don’t necessarily agree that this should be equated with always being strong, never crying, not cleaning or cooking or doing other “women’s work.” Or those women who identify as female, but don’t agree that this means they need to be soft-spoken, deferent, pretty, nurturing, etc. These people end up clinging to stereotypes of what they think they should be because they don’t feel like they can be themselves without running the risk of being called gay or girly or a pussy or a bitch or bossy or shrill or a dyke or a fairy or any number of other put-downs based on living outside the gender-norm box. They end up being hyper-aggressive or spend all their time persecuting people who live freely as themselves. They fathers who won‘t allow their daughters to go to school or play sports for fear they won’t be able to “get a husband.” Etc.

I could go on about this for a number of pages, but that’s not the point. My friends on Facebook are generally a pretty progressive bunch. It isn’t unusual to see plenty of posting about women’s issues, but this speech just took over. I love the speech. I don’t want to criticize anything she said. But there was something just bugging me about the fact that it was getting shared SO MUCH and I couldn’t figure out why. Part of it was that most of what she said was nothing new. Then one FB friend shared a TED talk from a few years ago by Chimamanda Adichie about being a feminist. She pointed out that many women of color have already made similar speeches and appeals without the same attention. Emma Watson is more “palatable,” she said, as a pretty, white woman with a manner of speaking acceptable to “the social elite.”

True. No doubt. But this helped me realize what else bothered me about the virality of the speech. While Emma Watson begins by talking about being “confused at being called ‘bossy’ because I wanted to direct the plays we would put on for our parents” at age 8. But she could never be confused for bossy while speaking at the UN. Her affect for the full 12 minutes is nervous (understandably when addressing the UN), meek, deferential and entirely feminine, in the traditional sense of word. She uses strong words: “think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision making that affect my life. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights.” But she never seems angry.

In fact, the reality that only when a pretty white woman can say these things without stepping outside of the socially-acceptable female manner of speaking does it go viral, supports everything she said in the speech. As does the fact that following the release of the video, she has been threatened with the release of nude photos in retaliation.

While the content of her speech was empowering, the delivery was not. This might not seem fair to Emma, who generally does project a beautifully bossy image. Just do a Google search for pictures of her and all the top results are of her staring directly into the camera, very clearly letting you know that you had better get out of her way. My reaction is not based on her, but on the internet’s reaction to her as compared with others. I support anything that gets people talking in a constructive way about women’s rights, but I am left feeling sad that the message has to come wrapped in this package in order to be “palatable.”

Another example that showed up on Facebook today came from John Oliver. He recently produced a fantastic piece of investigative journalism regarding the Miss America Pageant and its claim to be the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women. It is an example of what the media should be doing in terms of fact-checking and holding people accountable for the truth of their claims. Here is the video for those of you who want the whole story:

For those of you who want the short version, Miss America claims to provide $45 million in scholarship funds for women each year. Oliver and his team went and got the tax filings that are public record because Miss America is a non-profit foundation (!!) and found that the actual amount given directly by Miss America as scholarship money last year was $482,000 – a decent amount, but $44.5 million off the figure claimed on television. They looked deeper into what “provide” might mean and found that the total included all scholarships made theoretically available by all state and local competitions that lead up to the final pageant.

My favorite example of the creative accounting they employed to reach the $45 million came from Miss Alabama. This organization “provides” $2,592,000 in scholarships to Troy University, although not a single person has attended Troy University on a Miss Alabama scholarship. The “provision” comes from the value of one scholarship offered as a prize, $54,000, multiplied by the number of contestants. Another state includes the total value of four scholarships that the first place winner can choose between, even though it would be impossible for her to accept all four.

Unfortunately, even with the lower real numbers, it turns out that Miss America is in fact the largest provider of scholarships exclusively for women. Oliver takes the time to give a shout-out to three other organizations that provide scholarships for women, including the Society of Women Engineers, the Rankin Foundation and the Patsy Mink Foundation, in hopes that people will make some donations so that one of these orgs can surpass Miss America.

The reporting by Oliver is wonderful and he goes beyond attacking this claim to question the very existence of Miss America in this day and age, mocking the pageant host by saying, “It is the year 2014 and I am a fully clothed man standing in front of a line of women in swimsuits awaiting judgment.” He criticizes the fact that the scholarships are only available to women who know how to use butt-glue to keep a swimsuit in place, who are willing to swear to the fact that they have never been married or pregnant and who are judged on a 20-second response to an incredibly difficult question on a news-related topic. And he calls Donald Trump,"a clown made of mummified foreskin and cotton candy."

The piece is well researched and really funny. And to drive his point home, he closes with the Miss Last Week Tonight Pageant. "I’m proud to say we are the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women because tonight 400 million one-dollar scholarships will be made available to the winner, of which she may choose just one." Still funny. Then he brings out a “contestant,” who is young, beautiful and dressed in an evening gown. She takes her 20 seconds to explain that the fact that she has only 20 seconds to talk proves that Miss America is still all about beauty. The second contestant is Kathy Griffin, who takes her time to say it’s totally fine to award scholarships to women based on looks, as long as we do the same for men. Another beautiful woman in an evening gown comes out to crown Giuseppe, John Oliver’s new, more attractive replacement, as the winner.  Haha.

It’s not that this last segment was offensive, but I was left feeling that it was a missed opportunity. He wrapped up a whole segment about the objectification of women by bringing out two more nameless beautiful faces in full pageant gear, plus Kathy Griffin, who has made her fortune on the E! Network, home to all that is wrong with American culture in terms of insipid, depthless glamorization of image. Why not bring out Madeleine Albright or Rachel Maddow in an evening gown (or bikini!) and limit her to 20 seconds to make a well-reasoned argument? Why not invite on the leader of one of the scholarship orgs he plugged and give her the chance to talk about the importance of supporting girls who want to be engineers?

He produced a segment condemning the objectification of women in which the only women appearing were beautiful, well-dressed, well-made-up and generally fit the Miss America mold, instead of giving voice to women who break that mold and want to be valued by society for their contributions as thinkers, leaders and creators.

Because here is the thing about Miss America: opportunity cost. When we teach little girls that heir value lies in their appearance, we direct them to put their time, energy and attention into how they look, diverting time, energy and attention from other activities. Every minute a girl spends on her hair, makeup and clothes is another minute not spent studying math, learning to play an instrument, writing poetry, practicing free-throws, memorizing the periodic table of elements, or reading. Every ounce of energy spent worrying about her weight or her outfit is energy not put towards dreaming about being an astronaut. All the attention put on how successful women dress, do their makeup and carry themselves is attention not put on what they studied, who their mentors were, and how they overcame challenges.

These little girls grow up to be women who face the same trade-offs. I shudder to think about the cumulative time the average American woman spends doing her hair and makeup, let alone reading about fashion trends, shopping for the right clothing, getting waxed and peeled and plucked. What about money? Every dollar spent on Cosmo isn’t available to invest in their own businesses. All the money spent on anti-wrinkle cream isn’t spent on their daughter’s education. And this ties back to Emma Watson’s point about gender norms. For girls and women who don’t feel they fit neatly in the box of femininity, it takes that much more time and energy to get them there.

What would happen if women suddenly put the same amount of time, energy and money into their appearance as men and put the remainder into professional success and personal fulfillment? Would we see more women running companies? Inventing life saving drugs? Designing skyscrapers? As professional athletes? Guitar virtuosos?

This blog post itself is an example. Every moment I spend writing about Emma Watson and Miss America, I am not finishing my other post about illegal logging by foreign companies in Mozambique. I am not reviewing my class notes and improving the lesson I will teach later today. But until all the injustices that Ms. Watson mention in her speech have been resolved, I still think this is a good use of my time and energy.