A pageant queen has given up her crown after a skit performed during the Miss Massachusetts pageant mocked the #MeToo movement – and, in her estimation, crossed the line.
In a post on Instagram last week, 24-year-old Maude Gorman, hitherto Miss Plymouth County for the Miss Massachusetts Miss America Organization, explained why she was giving up the title for which she had worked so hard. “While I’m grateful for the opportunities that @missamerica creates for young women,” she wrote, “I am also internally conflicted; as the #metoo movement was mocked on stage during the final competition of Miss Massachusetts. As both a survivor and advocate for victims rights and sexual violence on a whole, I refuse to stand idly by and simply let this go … for every person who felt liberated by the #metoo movement … I will not allow ANYONE to take away that power and liberation.”
In the skit in question, a female host prayed to God asking why the swimsuit competition had been eliminated. “I’m trying to understand, God, why it happened,” she cried. “Me too, Amy,” a person on stage dressed as “God” replied, before holding up a #MeToo sign to uproarious laughter from the audience. (To date, the movement to fight sexual harassment and assault has not gone after a woman’s right to consensually participate in a bikini contest.)
In the same post, Gorman noted that she’d been bullied backstage by fellow titleholders for being a survivor. In the course of her work advocating for victims of sexual assault, Gorman has spoken openly about her gang rape by three men at age 13, a story she said some of her competitors had smeared as “fake”.
The story is, in many ways, a microcosm of the uneven ways the pageant world is attempting to progress with the times after years of retrograde gender politics. While Miss America has long justified itself as a scholarship program for young women, the irony of deciding which young woman gets to go to college based on how she looks in a bikini and/or evening gown was not lost on most people. The organization did away with the swimwear portion in 2017 after the CEO Sam Newell’s sexual harassment scandal resulted in his resignation and a new, all-woman board that included Gretchen Carlson, who famously called out Roger Ailes for harassing her during her time at Fox News.
But at a state level, many Miss America-affiliated pageants are unhappy with the direction Carlson has taken. Last week representatives from 22 state pageants signed a petition calling for the resignations of the Miss America Organization Board of Trustees, including Carlson and the CEO, Regina Hopper. The petition only complains about vague issues of governance and does not mention the removal of the swimsuit competition – but in an interview on Good Morning America yesterday, Carlson suggested that was the real reason some in the organisation were unhappy.
“Change is difficult,” Carlson said. “When I took on this role of leading this organization six months ago, we had a lot of work to do. And swimsuit has been a part of Miss America since it started in 1921 and many of the volunteers and state EDs, executive directors, have been around for a long time and it is tradition. But at the same time, this board unanimously decided that we needed to move this program forward.”
The pageant world remains plagued by widespread sexual harassment and abuse including on the part of Donald Trump, who owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. In an interview on Howard Stern’s radio show, Trump boasted about entering contestants’ dressing rooms and ogling their bodies. He said no men were allowed but “I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant”. A number of Miss USA contestants have said Trump walked in on them changing.
The Miss America Organization has since issued a statement apologizing for the skit and blaming it on the emcee’s unauthorized creative license. Separately, the host apologised for the joke, saying it had been misunderstood. Still, the fact that this skit happened at all, the reaction of the audience and the backstage behavior of Gorman’s supposed sisters in education-seeking show that the MAO has a long way to go before it achieves the goal of becoming the world’s first feminist-approved beauty pageant.
