There she goes

First off, any time I hear about Miss USA or Miss Something Or Other, I immediately check the calendar to make sure it's still 2024 and not 1954, a time when beauty pageants were important to people, before we all had our consciousness raised about what makes people great. 

Hint: It's not beauty.

But they still have these pageants, and maybe their time is coming to a merciful end, because recently, Miss USA 2023, Noelia Voigt, resigned her post, tossing away her tiara because of differences with pageant management.

Ms Voigt

Then, two days later, Miss Teen USA UmaSofia Srivastava gave up her title as well, and people are paying attention to all this.  Voigt made a statement about her mental health being adversely affected by the way the business is run. 

It seems that turmoil is the order of the day in that business, and maybe it's because the women involved feel like mannequins being told to look pretty and stay quiet about things that matter to them, such as their mental health.

It will be interesting to see if these extravaganzas even exist in a few more years. You certainly don't see them on TV like you used to, and can you even name a Miss America like you could back in the day? 

Here's a sign that things are wrong: Laylah Rose, who is both CEO and president of the Miss USA Organization put out a statement that said her goal is "to inspire women to always create new dreams, have the courage to explore it all, and continue to preserve integrity along the way."

Now there's a statement that really states nothing. Pure air.

But people who really follow this game caught something interesting about Ms Voigt's letter of resignation: If you take the first letter of each sentence, that spells out the words "I am silenced." 

I am honored to see this tradition continue. It was, oh, about 1996 that my supervisor forced me to write a letter of apology to someone we dealt with, to atone for an honest mistake made by a person I supervised. I thought it was unnecessary, but she still made me write the letter. So I did, and I sent it. And was it my fault that the first letter of each of the fourteen words spelled out a novel method of self-gratification?

It felt good.