Being Miss America: behind the rhinestone curtain

This chapter shows how the humanization of sex is impeded. First, it is thwarted by the parading of cultural-identity images for the sexually dispossessed, to make money. These images become the tyrant gods of the secular society, undercutting its liberation from religion and transforming it into a kind of neotribal culture. Second, the authentic secularization of sex is checkmated by an anxious clinging to the sexual standards of the town, an era so recent and yet so different from today that simply to transplant its sexual ethos into today's situation is to invite hypocrisy of the worst degree. The chapter then looks at the spurious sexual models conjured up for the anxious society by the sorcerers of the mass media and the advertising guild. Like all pagan deities, these come in pairs—the god and his consort. For this chapter's purposes they are best symbolized by The Playboy and Miss America.

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1. "A Certain Class of Girl": Respectability and the Structure of the Miss America Pageant

The Most Beautiful Girl in the World ◽

10.1525/9780520922600-004 ◽

1999 ◽

pp. 31-57

Keyword(s):

Miss America

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REVISING MISS AMERICA'S STORY

PEDIATRICS ◽

10.1542/peds.95.1.146 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 95 (1) ◽

pp. 146-146

Author(s):

J. F. L.

Keyword(s):

Hearing Loss ◽

American Academy ◽

Bacterial Infection ◽

Nerve Damage ◽

Childhood Vaccination ◽

News Reports ◽

Hemophilus Influenzae ◽

American Academy Of Pediatrics ◽

Miss America

Concerned about news reports linking the hearing loss of the new Miss America to a childhood vaccination, the American Academy of Pediatrics said the actual culprit was a bacterial infection. The Academy said in a statement on Thursday that it had learned from her pediatrician, Dr. Ted Williams of Dothan, AL, that the nerve damage to Heather Whitestone's ears was caused by a Hemophilus influenzae, or H-influenzae infection.

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