If you think the acronym “NSA” is shorthand for the 2011 romantic comedy No Strings Attached then you have probably heard about Miss Utah screwing up her onstage question at the Donald Trump-owned Miss USA pageant. If you haven’t heard about it, here is a clip, and also who are you and why are you reading this blog?
Rough.
Now, I’ve noticed that people are taking either one of two positions with this Miss Utah situation (you’ve entered the situation room! What does NSA stand for? Who is Benghazi? I DUNNO!):
They either A.) Have zero sympathy and call her a bimbo, or B.) Give her all of the sympathy because stringing together a coherent sentence on national TV is very nerve wracking.
But I’ve found a third option because I don’t see the deflated breast implant as half empty or half full.
Hold on, it’s gonna take me a minute to get to it…
Maybe Marissa Powell isn’t very smart, but she doesn’t have to be. She was campaigning for Miss USA (and probably for a show on FOX News), not Secretary of State. Not everyone can be smart, and I feel like the probability of having that symmetrical of a face AND knowing how to intelligently answer a question on the societal implications of the gender/wage gap is very slim.
Slim like that beautiful waistline of hers.
Or maybe she is smart and that 30 second clip wasn’t an accurate reflection of her intelligence.
Regardless, as an audience, it’s not fair that we watch a pageant where you won’t be taken seriously if you’re under 5’9 without heels and throw them a question on gender inequality (perhaps a subject that pageant girls from Utah aren’t super familiar with?) then tell them to just shut their mouthes and stick to being beautiful when they screw it up.
Surely, there was a beautiful woman up there who could have answered the question eloquently, but don’t eviscerate Miss Utah because she couldn’t. If you want the real answer to that onstage question, then why don’t we open up the pageant to some Bryn Mawr student who doesn’t know the proper form for a squat.
Either way, pageants aren’t a great scale to measure a woman on because being smart or beautiful doesn’t determine the worth of a human being. Apparently, Marissa is a singer/songwriter, an ambassador for a charity that brings rehabilitation medicine to Haiti, and has a terminally ill little brother, so maybe she’s not so bad and we can all chill the eff out on publicly humiliating a 21 year-old. At least she’s out there doing something other than crack. I don’t love pageants, but they are certainly better than crack.
Sooooo, I guess that third option I was talking about earlier is we all enter into a nationwide suicide pact for allowing Donald Trump to decide the criteria for the ideal woman? That sounds right, I think.
Ugh, feminism is hard.
Here’s another idea: instead of making fun of someone, we use all that excess energy to burn TMZ to the ground for posting stuff like this:
Who’d you rather, guys?! Miss South Carolina !!TEEN!! or Miss Utah?
Rather what?
Hire as the CFO for your Silicon Valley start-up?
Be the godmother and role model to your future children?
Put your penis in?
Right!! Sorry!! That last one is all that matters! Thanks, TMZ!!!!
