Sex, the Church, and Miss California: Women’s Lib and Beauty Pageants

I graduated from high school in 1972, the first class not to have a draft number. It was the age of hippies, war protesters, and assasinations. And women’s lib.

The Equal Rights Amendment was in the headlines daily, and the struggle was for women to have equal pay for equal work. The Equal Rights Amendment never passed, but sex discrimination in employment was banned by the Civil Rights Act, and other gender distinctions were eliminated by numerous changes to state laws by legislatures and courts. Alabama, for example, eliminated nearly all gender distinctions as to property rights during the 1970s.

And by the standards of the 1970s, I’m a feminist. That is, I believe women should receive equal pay for equal work and should be hired for whatever work they qualify for. I distinctly remember that when my wife got her first job after college (as a CPA), she was paid less than men of equal or lesser qualification. You see, many of the firm’s clients wouldn’t allow a woman to audit their books. She passed the CPA exam on her first try. And we really could have used the money she didn’t get paid.

Many of the women who graduated with me from law school in 1978 faced severe discrimination — often from judges — but they battled through it. Women getting their first jobs today have no idea of the debt they owe to the women a generation older.

And in those days of rapid, radical change, women’s liberation popularized the image you see at the beginning of this post. It’s a woman marked for carving as though she were a side of beef. The message was supposed to be that women should not be judged as sex objects — for just their bodies. Indeed, there was a time when a man had to be careful about complimenting his date on her figure — because we men were supposed to be attracted by her mind rather than her body. (Yes, really.)

While I was in college, I remember reading an editorial in a college newspaper by a college woman declaring her pleasure with the fact that the college women were all wearing blue jeans and tee shirts (sweat shirts in the winter), so that the rich and poor looked much the same. Times have changed.

I enrolled at David Lipscomb College in 1972, and one of the prettiest girls in the freshman class was named Cindy (I think. It’s been a really long time.) She was a Nordic blond with hair cascading down her neck in ringlets. And when the sororities social clubs invited the freshmen girls to join, she joined what was obviously the wrong club. You see, the girls clubs sorted the girls out by physical attractiveness just as surely as if the men had scored them 1 to 10.

This was shortly after the movie “10” and the 1972 summer Olympics with Olga Korbut. One day, a bunch of guys set up a table at the cafeteria line and held up cards with numbers scoring the girls walking through the lunch line 1 to 10 as though they were judging the Good Looks Olympics. They got in BIG trouble. And yet the girls sorted themselves out by looks, too, as they were invited to join one social club or another. And Cindy should have been in the club with the prettiest girls (every school has one).

But Cindy joined the club filled with the passed-over girls. The ones with bad complexions, or who weighed too much, or who had bad teeth. And for the rest of her time at Lipscomb, there was beautiful Cindy (a solid 10) in amongst her less-than-10 friends. But, you see, her beauty wasn’t in her ringlets. In was in having Jesus’ heart, because if Jesus had been a girl, that’s the club he would have joined.

In the 1970s women wanted to escape being judged by their bodies — as mere sex objects — but today the women’s liberation movement has radically changed. Rather than seeking a higher, nobler ideal, the question has been rephrased in terms of power — women should not give men the power to decide how they’ll be viewed or how they’ll present themselves. Thus, true liberation is being whomever you wish to be. And if you wish to be a sex object, well, if that’s your decision, you go girl!

Therefore, rather than being about self-improvement, it’s about self-actualization, defined as autonomy. You can be a pole dancer or a nun. It’s all good so long as it’s you. In Christian terms, women’s liberation has descended into the degradation Paul speaks about in Romans 1.

(Rom 1:24)  Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

We see the change reflected in the popular culture. TV and movies are fascinated by pornography stars, strippers, prostitutes, and lesbians, seeking to change our perceptions of these images to be normal. But mistresses are never praised or normalized. You see, prostitutes can be envisioned as using men (not true, but that’s the image), whereas mistresses are plainly being used by men. They don’t get paid.

All of which brings me to beauty pageants. In the 1970s, beauty pageants were badly out of fashion. They were often picketed. Participants were seen as allowing themselves to be viewed as mere sex objects. After all, in contests such as Miss USA, the only question was how pretty the girl looks in a swimsuit or evening gown. (Miss America was seen as a little less degrading because the contestants had to have a talent in addition to runway and swimsuit skills.)

And I bought the arguments. I thought women should be viewed as much more than cuts of meat, and so I’ve been opposed to beauty pageants my entire adult life. I don’t attend them, and I don’t watch them on TV.

But then, I’m the father of four boys. I have no daughters, and so I’ve never had to deal with a daughter wanting to participate in her school’s beauty walk. Do they do beauty walks anywhere else? Around here, the public schools have learned that people will pay money to see their daughters, granddaughters, and sisters stand on stage in evening wear — thereby raising money for their schools. This sometimes happens at the middle school level, even.

One of my sons was invited by a middle school girl to watch her in her school’s beauty walk, and he came home afterwards explaining how degraded he felt, with middle school girls dolled up to be viewed as, well, cuts of meat. He was particularly disturbed that there were older men there with cameras taking photos of middle school girls they were plainly not related to. I’d never shared my antipathy toward beauty pageants with him until then, but we had a good talk about the whole thing and how he really should judge girls.

Now, whenever I discuss these concerns with women, well, it gets ugly fast. I suggest that girls shouldn’t be taught that their value is in their looks, and their mothers look at me with that “This does not compute” look. They can’t even process the concern. I mean, of course girls should be taught that beauty matters. It does! And in modern society, it really does. (Does anyone think the newswomen on FoxNews and CNN get their jobs based on some other criteria?) But does that mean we should encourage this attitude? Or that we should encourage our daughters’ to build their self-esteems on their looks?

It’s just as true that height matters. Tall men tend to get promoted faster and make more money than, well, men like me. Should we have height pageants?

So maybe I’ve just not caught the new feminism wave yet. Maybe society is actually teaching our daughters good, healthy Christian lessons about who they really are. Maybe our mothers and daughters know exactly how Jesus wants them to see themselves. And maybe our sons are being taught to correctly view women by all this. Maybe.

But when I read about the hooking up culture on college campuses, where college boys and girls have casual sex with no commitment, I have to figure that someone is telling our daughters that they should allow themselves to be prostituted by boys, and telling our sons that it’s okay to use women. Right? And where did they hear that message?

Now, the tough question is this: does encouraging a culture where girls are valued on their beauty and men are encouraged to evaluate girls on their beauty encourage men to see girls as sex objects? and encourage women to see themselves as sex objects?

It’s my view that it’s the nature of the male to equate beauty with sexuality. Men are visually stimulated, much more so than women. I doubt that most women realize how arousing visual stimulus is to the man. I mean, there’s a major pornography industry doing nothing but producing visual stimuli for men — and there’s not one for women. Not really. Men and women are just different in this respect. And most women have no idea how a man views a seductively dressed girl.

Therefore, mothers and daughters often don’t realize how they are seen by men. Put a girl in a bikini on stage, and her mom thinks she’s “cute.” The men think she’s “hot,” meaning sexually stimulating. Therefore, if I had daughters, we’d probably struggle quite a lot over these things. I mean, I just don’t think you can, consistently with Christian values, present yourself on a stage where the entire goal is to be objectified. It degrades our daughters, our sons, and our society — even if the pretty young thing is opposed to gay marriage.