The US beauty pageant industry, in a concise summation made last week, is “such a hot mess”.
Two reigning beauty queens have stepped down in as many weeks, and there may be more turbulence to come to an area of showbusiness that promotes a sheen of perfection – at least among its contestants – but is increasingly seen as out of date with modern social mores.
The drama started when 24-year-old Miss USA 2023 Noelia Voigt recently handed back her crown, citing her mental health in a cryptic Instagram post that also appeared to contain the hidden message “I am silenced.”
Voigt later said that a driver who was taking her to a Christmas parade in Florida had made “inappropriate advances” towards her, and that she had received little or no support when she raised the matter with the pageant president, Laylah Rose, who allegedly told to her, “It is, unfortunately, part of the role you’re in as a public figure.”
In a resignation letter, Voigt said Rose threatened to take away her salary for minor issues, and that Rose had said she hoped Voigt would be hit in the face by a baseball when she was booked to throw the opening pitch at a game.
That was soon followed by the resignation of Miss Teen USA UmaSofia Srivastava, who said said her “personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization”.
Srivastava, a 16-year-old high-schooler from New Jersey had won the title in September, had previously expressed pride at being the first Mexican-Indian American to do so.
The double resignations have thrown the Miss USA organization, which runs both pageants, into disarray, with accusations of mismanagement and a hostile work environment filling air like so much hairspray, rhinestones and positive thoughts.
Many of the accusations are centered on Rose, the Miss USA organization’s president. At least superficially – on Instagram – Voigt and Rose had a good relationship. “Thank you, @laylahrose, for making all this happen,” one Voigt post read. “She has been going over and beyond! Love our president!” read another.
But insiders said they didn’t, and Voigt did not write or post the glowing messages about Rose, according to the Daily Beast, which had been written by the organization’s social media team.
And there was more to come. Turbulence in the Miss USA organization, characterized by changes in leadership, falling revenues and declining TV audiences, and ambitions to turn it into a showcase for female empowerment, have upended what was once a valuable entertainment franchise.
According to the Beast’s reporting, problems at Miss USA started as soon as Rose took the reins last year. “It was a shitstorm from the minute it took off,” one pageant director told the outlet.
Rose, a former contestant who also walked in New York fashion shows, told NBC that “the wellbeing of all individuals associated with Miss USA is my top priority”.
“All along, my personal goal as the head of this organization has been to inspire women to always create new dreams, have the courage to explore it all, and continue to preserve integrity along the way,” she said. “I hold myself to these same high standards and I take these allegations seriously.”
According to Hilary Levey Friedman, author of Here She is, a history of the US beauty pageant, the controversy at Miss USA is “unprecedented”.
“No Miss USA since 1952 has ever resigned before, and the only other national title holder who ever resigned before was Vanessa Williams.”
Williams, who won “preliminary swimsuit” and “preliminary talent” (for a vocal performance of Happy Days Are Here Again), was crowned Miss America in 1984, becoming the first African American woman to hold the title. She was forced to resign months later over the unauthorized publication of nude photographs in Penthouse.
Friedman points out that controversies have been on the increase. In 2022, days after R’Bonney Gabriel was crowned Miss USA after winning Miss Universe, some contestants publicly accused competition organizers of rigging the vote.
An investigation was launched and the Miss Universe organization suspended the Miss USA president, Crystle Steward, who had herself held the Texas, USA and universe titles in 2008.
Friedman, who argues in her book that beauty pageants often reflect the arc of feminism, said the current controversy should be seen in that context. “The current wave of feminism is about women organising and using their voices, particularly talking about mental health, harassment, [and] workplace conditions generally, so it’s not surprising we should see this in pageants.”
But the tumult is not limited to Miss USA/Universe. In 2018, the Miss America pageant eliminated the swimsuit competition to focus on being more inclusive of women of all sizes, and to judge contestants on inner rather than outer beauty.
Winner Cara Mund later complained she had been “bullied, manipulated and silenced” by the pageant’s leadership, including the former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, Miss America 1989, who had been instrumental in forcing the resignation of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes amid multiple claims of sexual harassment.
Mund said Carlson, the chairwoman, and CEO Regina Hopper had made her life “miserable”. Her speech, she said, had been cut to 30 seconds, and she was told that a dress she had been approved to wear in the traditional “show us your shoes” parade could not be worn. The two women, she added, had “systematically silenced me, reduced me, marginalized me, and essentially erased me in my role as Miss America in subtle and not-so-subtle ways on a daily basis”.
If the current set of pageant scandals are intra-women, it has not always been that way. Friedman devotes a section of her book – Tabloids, Trump, Tits – to the era when Donald Trump owned the Miss USA franchise from 1996 to 2015.
The former president is said to have met his second wife Marla Maples when she was Miss Hawaiian Tropic, and he liked to hang backstage with contestants because, he said, he “owned it”. At least three of “his” beauty queens lived in Trump Tower. According to Friedman, Trump is a “central figure linking pageantry, politics, and feminism”.
Among the former US president’s more memorable contributions was when, in 1996, he tried to put Miss Venezuela, Miss Universe Alicia Machado on a diet, and complained she was an “eating machine”.
“One of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest – he loves beauty contests, supporting them, and hanging around them – and he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy’, and then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she was Latina,” Machado later recalled.
According to Friedman, the controversies are indicative of a broader shift in America that embraces women’s rights. She said: “Young women are seeing in the wake of the Women’s March in the US, [and] the MeToo and Time’s Up movements, that they can organize, use their voices, and don’t have to tolerate anything they view as workplace harassment and abuse.”
But Friedman also argues that the picture is somewhat nuanced. In the 1940s, Miss America added a scholarship at a time when women largely were not seeking higher education or given the opportunity to fund it. “For some people this is a tool of social mobility,” she points out, “and for some people it is empowering.
“If women want to say, this is empowering for me, and a great way to use my voice, speak out and be part of my community, and it works for them, then we shouldn’t cut off an opportunity just because it’s not our choice,” Friedman said.
Objectively, Friedman said, people were not paying as much attention to staged beauty pageants as they once did, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t watching – we’re now doing it in other ways.
“The Bachelor is extremely popular, and has a major element of a beauty pageant every episode. Instagram, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition still comes out, the Victoria’s Secret fashion has come back, the Met Gala,” she said. “Especially with the rise of reality TV and social media influencers – they have just changed form.”
