I've never been a big fan of one way beauty pageants choose to award scholarship money to young women (Swimsuits! Why did it have to be swimsuits!). But pageant contestants using the competition to campaign for LGBT rights and gender-based activism? I'll take that!

Last year, Miss D.C. 2009 Jen Corey campaigned on a recycling platform, "Let's Talk Trash!" Once crowned, though, Corey devoted significant effort in her reign to speaking out against public sexual assault in the District and voicing her support for D.C.'s LGBT community.

Just last night, Claire Buffie was named Miss New York 2010 in this year's Miss America pageant on a platform of gay rights. (Local angle: She designed Corey's website!) From Buffie's official bio:

Miss New York 2010, Claire Buffie, is an outspoken advocate of human rights, opening the dialogue about equality amoungst youth, teens and adults alike with her platform "Straight for Equality: Let's Talk." The issues of gay rights make up the civil rights movement of our generation and reach far beyond marriage equality. As Miss New York 2010, Claire aims to break the stigma of marginalized youth, eliminating discriminatory vocabulary and changing the climate in New York schools. She celebrates diversity and the things that make us all unique and aims to instill pride, dignity and respect in developing minds and compassionate hearts. This will be a year of change in New York State and Claire is ready to support this incredible movement.

It's an interesting moment for America when the most traditional of contests for women begins championing the rights of people who are marginalized based on gender and sexual orientation. Buffie's Twitter stream offers a look at what life is like for a woman juggling pageant duties and LGBT activism. Turns out it includes regular work-outs, some spray-tan application, and plenty of PFLAG meetings—and that's all on top of her day job. "Awesome Photoshoot with @nycpageants and bianca Thomas and now off to the Straight for Equality Gala with @pflagnyc!!" one Tweet reads. Here's another: "Work. @pflagnyc board meeting. Work out. Dance. @GLEEonFOX ! Reply to 945793 emails. Sleep. Can I eat in there somewhere?" Let's hope the answer to that last question is "yes."

Traditional beauty pageants come with all sorts of strange entrance requirements. In order to compete in the Miss America pageant, for example, a constestant must be an unmarried woman who has always been female, has never been pregnant, and has never engaged in any "immoral" or "indecent" activities.

D.C.'s annual LGBT pageant, Mr. and Miss Capital Pride, welcomes married, transgender, and pregnant contestants. The sexual history of entrants is unimportant; the entrance requirements don't even specify that contestants be part of the LGBT community. But the Pride pageant has got a few strange rules of its own. From the 2010 application [PDF]:

1. Do not get high and steal from other pageant contestants.

Any contestant, or person affiliated with a contestant, who misappropriates the property of another contestant, violates any law regarding the abuse of alcohol or drugs, or is caught in the act of stealing will be disqualified and removed from the location of the contest. Unsportsmanlike conduct by a contestant or contestant’s entourage (dresser, dancer) before, during or after the pageant will not be tolerated and is subject to immediate dismissal from the venue and pageant.

2. Entourage is responsible for any damage inflicted by entourage.

It is further understood by signature of this application and submission of this application, contestants and the contestant’s entourage (dresser, dancers) will take responsibility for any and all damage (should it occur) to Town before, during or after the pageant.

3. Only one dresser at a time:

Each contestant will be allowed ONLY one (1) dresser at any given time. Contestants must remain in the assigned area at all times. Administrative points will be deducted from contestants who do not remain in the designated area. Dressers and Dancers as well as any other helpers with a contestant must pay at the front door before being allowed access to the dressing room.

4. No tips.

At no time during the contests shall a contestant or their helper(s) receive a gratuity of any kind during their time on stage.

5. All colors of rainbow must be represented. Rules for the "Pride Attire" category:

Pride attire may be presented by the contestant in the form of his/her most imaginative and creative style. Pride attire is not limited to any one color, but should encompass the full scale of the rainbow. Make your own statement and get as creative as you like.

6. No strings attached. Rules for the ladies' "Evening Gown" category:

Evening gown will be the most elegant outfit you wear during the pageant (i.e. full length not a cocktail dress). It should complement your figure and make a statement of your personal style and taste. The dress accessories should be in perfect condition. No strings should be anywhere on the dress unless the style warrants it. There should be no tears in any part of the fabric and the gown should be stain and wrinkle free. It is your responsibility to take care of the gown and keep it in perfect condition during the pageant.

7. Black jeans are not formal wear. Rules for the men's "Formal Wear" category [Gender nerd noted: Observe how the women's gowns must "complement your figure" while the men's formal wear must simply "complement you"]:

Formal wear should be the most distinguished outfit you wear during the contest (i.e. black tie, tails, regular or modern tuxedo, no black jeans). It should complement you and make a statement of your personal style and taste. No strings should be anywhere on the formal attire. There should be no tears in any part of the fabric and the garment should be stain and wrinkle free. It is your responsibility to take care of your formal wear and keep it in perfect condition during the pageant.

8. Lip-syncing will be judged on proper phrasing. I love that there are three possible talent categories here: "lip-sync," "live vocal," and "other." Hey, beats the swimsuit competition:

Talent is the highest point category in the Mr. & Miss Capital Pride 2010 contests. Contestants will be judged on the quality of lip-sync, live vocal or other entertainment. Judges will be looking for lip sync or live singing ability. This will include but not limited to words to his/her song and proper phrasing within the song. If it is a live performance, is the talent of good quality? If there is choreography, the dancers should know the steps and steps should flow. If a member of your troupe does not know his/her part, points will be deducted from you score. Quality of set design and construction are not judged (note: allowed height 8 feet). All contestants are responsible for their sets. Judges are instructed to deduct points if a set does not complement or enhance the talent and if the set falls or is broken during the talent phase of competition. All costuming and set design should fit the style and mood of the talent being presented. Is your talent appropriate for competition? Does your talent move, excite or educate the judges panel and the audience. It is important to know that you are being judged by a panel of judges and not by the audience. Keep in mind that subcategories make up the total score in each category of competition.

In other words: This is going to be awesome. The Mr. and Miss Capital Pride 2010 pageant will begin promptly at 7 p.m. Friday, June 4th at Town Danceboutique.

Photo via JenniferCorey.com

On Sunday evening, Rima Fakih was crowned Miss USA 2010. By morning, her reign had already been tarnished by the requisite beauty queen sex scandal. Photos had surfaced of the now-24-year-old Fakih dancing on a stripper pole in a local radio event titled "Stripper 101." But as Broadsheet's Tracy Clark-Flory notes, Fakih's "official Miss USA glamor shots" (above) are actually significantly more risque than the "stripper" shots, which revealed Fikah—clothed—in short-shorts and a tank top.

Well, well, well. What on earth could possibly be happening here?

First, Clark-Flory lays out the sexual landscape:

What's absurd—no, make that what's most absurd—about this faux scandal is that the photos of Fakih pole-dancing are far tamer than the official Miss USA glamor shots. As Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote last week, it seemed pageant officials were "heading scandal off at the pass" by releasing a "spank-worthy collection of its contestants in lingerie." Fakih is wearing less clothing in her glamor shot than in her pole-dancing pics—we're talking fishnets, a garter and a bra compared to a tank top and booty shorts. In all seriousness, you're likely to see racier getups on suburban soccer moms at their local strip aerobics class.

"The beauty queen's fall from grace has been institutionalized and mainstreamed," Clark-Flory continues. "The post-win scandal is now every bit an expected and essential part of the pageant as the swimsuit portion of the show. It's all so predictable and boring. Could it be that we're nearing maximum sex scandal capacity?"

Not a chance. Clark-Flory is right that it's boring, predictable, and hypocritical for the Miss USA pageant to expect completely virginal contestants when the pageant itself encourages its Misses to embody the other half of that particular dichotomy.

But this pattern—parading its contestants in string bikinis and high-heels, and then clutching its pearls over any unsanctioned skin-showing—is hardly an idiosyncrasy of the pageant circuit. This comes from a long and storied tradition of (a) expecting women to be extremely sexy, and then (b) furiously policing their sexuality by confining it to particular contexts, which are controlled by (c) assigned (usually) male guardians, like fathers, husbands, and pageant organizers.

That's why Americans have got our sexy teen pop stars who are saving themselves for marriage, our Christian true-believers who are saving their breast implants for their husbands,  and our beauty queens who are explicitly judged on how sexy they are—as long as they're only sexy for Donald Trump. Last year, Miss California USA funded Carrie Prejean's breast implants, only to ditch her when she almost showed them off. It doesn't matter that these beauty queens are often wearing less clothes in the pageant than they are in their "sexy photo scandals"—they're still not saving themselves sufficiently, and for that they deserve to be shamed.

Trump, like many arbiters of female sexuality before him, wants a lady in the street but a freak in the, uh, swimsuit competition. He'll never find one—it's difficult to find a young woman who can perform sexuality at Miss-USA-standards without any practice.  So what's the only way to keep the dichotomy alive? Dole out the shaming when any less-than-perfectly-chaste photos arise. In an age when beauty pageant interest is flagging, the American public is still invested in that virgin-whore narrative—and slut-shaming for fun and profit has proved a reliable investment for Trump.

* On Tiger Beatdown, things you can learn from a $10 lapdance: The perfect performance of femininity is priceless. And by priceless I mean almost worthless:

Later, as I cried my eyes out on the couch in my apartment and my boyfriend soothed me, I tried to make sense of it. Here was this incredibly beautiful woman, who did everything, everythingthat a woman was supposed to do to make herself appealing to men. She was thin, she was compliant, she was beautiful, she spent probably hours every day shaving and lotioning and applying makeup and picking out clothes and pouring what was surely substantial cashflow into maintaining her appearance. She was, in a word, perfect. And then, this perfect woman would go to work, and rub her impeccably maintained and beautiful body all over any patron, at his or her request, no matter whether she liked the person or not, for TEN FUCKING DOLLARS? I mean, TEN DOLLARS? Less than I would spend on a pair of shoes. Less than I would spend on a motherfucking hamburger.

* The Miss England pageant has discarded its swimsuit competition in favor of in athletic wear. Sexy, revealing athletic wear:

[The current Miss England] said getting rid of the bikini round would prove the contest was about "real women."

"In a world of size zero models it's not a particularly good image to give out to girls that you've got to be stick thin," she said. "Having done Miss England two years in a row myself, I met girls who were all dieting and worrying about the bikini round and I just thought it's not a good image for girls to have, so we should get rid of it."

So: Because unrealistic standards of beauty are damaging to young women, bikinis will be replaced by short-shorts and sports bras, and pageant waves will make way for cheeky flexing (with a feminine pointed toe). Next up: The cognitive dissonance interview portion.

* This year, Pride goes alternative: alt.dc.pride will be providing a roster of events outside the LGBT mainstream.

* Via Rap Genius, the five most explicit sex scenes in rap history. Songs were graded based on five categories, the most important of which was "wetness."

* from the Guttmacher Institute's newest study, on the demographics of women who seek abortions: "Almost half of all women obtaining abortion care live under the federal poverty line."

Photo via moaksey, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Jessica Valenti is right about the Miss Universe Pageant: As offensive as the public ranking of female swimsuit parts may be to the feminist eye, there's something very comforting about pageantry. Every year, the Universe comes together to televise an event that proves that sexism exists. In other words, they make for a really easy blog item.

And what's even better for a feminist critic than a beauty pageant? A beauty pageant with judges who try to bolster the Q-and-A with some feminist-lite questions, only to crown the winner who answers with the most sexism-denying rhetoric.

"I believe that nowadays we women have overcome many obstacles, and I do believe that we have reached the same level that men have," said Miss Venezuela, now Miss Universe, when asked what women can do to overcome sexism in the workplace. "We must realize there are no longer any barriers amongst us." And the crowd—along with us bored feminist bloggers—goes wild.

It is a simple formula for both comedy and political commentary:

Take a public figure (Sarah Palin) who holds disagreeable views (abstinence-only education). Zero in on an aspect of her personal life counter to those views (her own teen daughter, Bristol Palin, becoming pregnant). Reveal the comedic irony and/or hypocrisy of the public/private contrast. Repeat ad nauseam on blogs, 24-hour news channels, and late night talk shows.

We should all beware this construction. Though very easy to pull off—and often journalistically and comedically sound—it is a trap. And it will render us all hypocrites. Three lessons from history, after the jump.

SARAH PALIN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: Too many to count, but in this case, it's the abstinence thing.

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: When Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol became pregnant months before Palin rose to political fame as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, political commentators and comedians held up Bristol's pregnancy as evidence that abstinence is futile—even under the roof of your state's no-sex-before-marriage Governor.

IT'S A TRAP! The revelation came at the height of election season fervor, and liberal commentators ate Bristol's sexual activity up with a spoon. The term "knocked up" became par for the course. When the baby's father, Levi Johnston, told Tyra Banks that he and Bristol had practiced safe sex, Tyra et. al dismissed him as a liar. The late-night comedy cycle feasted on the Bristol-is-a-slut jokes. Even Palin family cheerleader Greta Van Susteren asked Bristol if she had been "lazy."

We forgot that even the most responsible of 17-year-old condom users don't put it on right every time. We forgot that condoms break. And we forgot that, when you're the governor's daughter in the small town of Wasilla, requesting birth control from your family doctor, seeking Plan B at a local pharmacy, or even buying condoms—anywhere—could cause such a shit-storm for you, your boyfriend, and your family, that it would have been hard to mount the courage to even approach the counter.

At some point, we forgot about why Bristol having sex was funny to begin with. The insane glee that we all derived from a teenage girl having sex before marriage became counter-intuitive—and downright creepy. We had crossed the hypocrisy bridge. We were no longer making a point about how young women should be free to choose to be sexually active. We no longer joked to show how bogus abstinence was. We joked to show that Bristol Palin was slutty, and that was enough to make it funny.

—

CARRIE PREJEAN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: During the Q-and-A section of  the 2009 Miss USA pageant, Miss USA California Carrie Prejean described her views on same-sex marriage this way:

"I think it's great that americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage, and in my country, and my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be a man or a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that was how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be. Between a man and a woman. Thank you."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: After rising to blogosphere infamy—with the help of question-asker Perez Hilton's videoblog declaring her a "bitch"—Prejean's past modeling career caught up to her. When topless photos of the 21-year-old Prejean surfaced on the Web, Prejean was accused of both violating her pageant contract and preaching inconsistent moral views. Who is she to preach good Christian values when she's flaunting her assets for cash?

IT'S A TRAP! Wait a second—since when did we start caring about women upholding the contractual obligations of beauty pageants? Pageants are among the most sexist and anti-feminist of American traditions. They encourage patriarchal views about the traditional roles women and men should hold in society. And guess what—gays don't have a place there.

But the patriarchy is also responsible for one of the most damaging of all hypocrisy constructions: the virgin-whore dichotomy. Shaming Carrie Prejean—a woman we've elevated through beauty pageants—for taking topless modeling photos is a very short leap for shaming gays and lesbians for expressing their sexuality. That's why this whole thing was hypocritical in the first place—but perhaps we're all too distracted by Carrie Prejean's boobs to remember. We may keep posting them in the interest of "revealing hypocrisy." But we all know the real reason they're on the Web: It's not hypocrisy anymore; it's hotness.

—

LARRY CRAIG

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: As a Republican Senator from Idaho, Craig often championed conservative moral values. William Saletan got specific in 2007, pointing out that Craig "helped to enact the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," revealing his "anti-gay hypocrisy."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: In June of 2007, Craig was arrested for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport:

According to the report filed by the officer who arrested Craig at the Minneapolis airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot, and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot … within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer explained, were known pickup signals in a room known (and hence under surveillance for) public sex. When the officer took Craig outside and told him so, Craig claimed he had been reaching down with his hand to retrieve a piece of paper from the floor. The officer wrote that no such paper had been on the floor.

IT'S A TRAP! I'll admit it—this is rich, fertile ground for the hypocrisy construction. Craig blows Palin and Prejean out of the water with this Perfect 10 hypocritical move: enacting anti-gay policies in law, and being gay in private. Jokes at Craig's expense were easy, valid, and very popular.

Conservatives, when not denying that any of this happened, joined in the shit-throwing. After all, this is the stuff homophobes' nightmares are made of—strange gay men attempting to have sex with them while they're taking care of business in a public restroom. For them, Craig reinforced the idea that homosexuals are sick and disgusting individuals just waiting to pounce on your unsuspecting bare penis. In other words, gays can pose a very real threat to their heterosexuality, and Craig proved it.

And yet, those who railed against Craig's institutionalized homophobia were the ones who took the most immense joy in the gay jokes. So—again—reveling in jokes about Larry Craig being gay began to lose their hypocritical anchor. On some level, the hypocritical construction allows people with pro-gay political views to indulge in some homophobic ribbing of their own. They see a rare window where making fun of gay sex is politically acceptable, and they sieze it. It's the same tale with Sarah Palin: People who support progressive sexual health policies, like comprehensive sex education, sieze the opportunity to make jokes about sluts. It's the same tale with Carrie Prejean: People who rail against patriarchal values, like "opposite marriage" and beauty pageants, sieze the opportunity to make sexist jokes.

So, let's all try not to descend too deeply into the hypocrisy construction's rabbit hole. Fall too far, and we become ripe for ironic commentary ourselves.