Just a few more comments on Miss California, and then I am done. Done, that is, until the next revolution on this merry-go-round that we call cultural commentary.
First, one commenter in the previous thread on this had a “physician, heal thyself” question which I thought would be better to answer here. He said that I was “mocking news reporters who show video clips of third grade teachers performing their side job, saying it’s hypocritical for a news reporter to do that while harping on ‘family values.'” But he then wonders whether I didn’t “do the same thing by plastering a picture of Carrie Prejean in a bikini just days ago?” Not surprisingly, I would answer that question with a no, and here is why. The kind of bump and grind footage that gets shown by ratings-ravenous networks in those situations is clearly calculated to juice their ratings while at the same time maintaining a stance of moral superiority. It is clearly being done in order to titillate the morally indignant. I wasn’t trying to increase my traffic with a lone bikini shot in a sea of theological words. If anything, it was likely to make my traffic go down. Having written this, it occurred to me to go look at my stats, and pretty much nothing odd happened after that post. So if I was up to no good, it didn’t work. But that was not the point — I was trying to make a point, a crucial point which lots of folks continue to miss. Much more is going on here than the square inch ratios between tanned skin and white cloth.
So let me come at this another way. Who cares about beauty pageants anyway? What is their natural constituency? I have heard it said, and I generally concur, that the natural audience for beauty pageants consists of rednecks and homosexuals. And out of this basic division in the audience, which of these two groups is mostly likely to have creative control of the aesthetic that dominates such events? Right — it would not be the rednecks. There was a reason that the poofter Hilton was one of the judges.
Go back and look at that picture again — ye who dare. What is the feminine aesthetic there? Who is in charge of it? When did that become the standard? When the ideal woman is designed by a guild of male homosexuals playing with boxes full of Barbie dolls, something is seriously screwy. When the ideal woman is thought to be a willowy boy with breast implants, doesn’t anyone find it ironic that one of the contestants in one of these events got in trouble for standing up to a homo judge? Shall the pot say to the potter, why have you made me like this?
So then, what happened in our discussion of this? After posting a picture of a woman in evangelical leadership in order to demonstrate some of the more obvious incongruities, many of the responses from the men showed that they were battling against lust (good), but appeared to have no awareness of where the templates of the current ideal were coming from (bad). A similar thing happens with Christian women. Christian women resent being held up to that as the ideal shape, but not for the right reason. They don’t resent it because they think is a ludicrous ideal, they resent it (or feel insecure about it) because they don’t believe they can measure up to it. They resent the failure, which is not the same thing as opposing the standard. Resenting the failure is actually a way of accepting the standard, in this case a standard crafted by homosexuals. But I don’t think the ideal woman should be crafted by homosexual designers the same way that first graders play with Mr. Potato Head.
Christian men fail to oppose the standard also — they hold that it is in fact the ideal shape but that they oughtn’t ever look at it. And they might succeed in their battle against lust, never ever looking, while the entire time they freely allow the world to dictate to them the shape of the objectum prohibitum.
We are still trying to figure out what to do with our queen when it was taken off the chess board three moves ago.