When I heard that the Miss America Pageant was ditching its swimsuit competition, I thought 鈥� it鈥檚 about time. Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox news anchor who鈥檚 now the Miss America chairwoman (and who also filed a harassment lawsuit against her former disgraced boss, the late Roger Ailes), promises that from now on contestants will be judged more on their talents and intelligence than on their looks. But I鈥檒l lay you odds that the next Miss America will still be slim, gorgeous, and gowned in something clingy as she promenades in front of the judges.
Sure, the contenders will also have to do something they鈥檝e practiced, like tap dancing, or expressing hopes for world peace. But I suspect that for many little girls, the pageant will still reinforce the fairy tale belief that princesses live happily ever after mostly because they are pretty, not because they're smart.
That mythology is changing, though, even in animated movies. The sisters in Disney鈥檚 Frozen are each powerful in their own ways - unlike, for example, The Little Mermaid, who gives up fins for a pair of legs, just so she can marry a bi-pedal human.
And let me just say it鈥檚 hard to imagine the plot in reverse - a guy giving up his life on land to live with a fish.
Now, I know it鈥檚 easy to overthink gender stereotypes, even as our children manage to transcend them. My daughter once cut her Barbie doll鈥檚 hair short and took her rock-climbing on a backyard boulder. Now she climbs mountains herself. She also wears lovely dresses on special occasions. Nothing wrong with looking great, but she seems to have absorbed the lesson that doing great stuff is even better.
So I was thrilled when my five-year-old granddaughter decided to dig for worms so she could go fishing in the pond behind her house. Her self-selected outfit for the day was a pink sundress, sparkly gold shoes, and a pocketbook with sequins.
After an hour at the edge of the garden thrusting her little polished fingernails into the damp earth, she happily stashed the wriggly bait into said purse 鈥� and didn鈥檛 mind a bit when she got a little mud on the Cinderella-like slippers and the frilly dress.
And as I gazed into her gorgeous big brown eyes I said, 鈥淲ow, those are beautiful 鈥� worms.鈥�
