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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Love this country, where you can be dumb as a brick, but as long as you are good looking people will find an excuse no dumb and incoherent an statement is.
But hey, in a country of used car salesmen, the dumb idiot bimbot shall be queen.
She couldn't be a better personification of what America is nowadays: Fake hair, over bleached smile, blank stare, and emptier brain saying emptier things: The eye-rack, blah, blah, blah... think of the children. America the dumb and proud, but hey she got a great pair of tits on her, yeeeeehhaaaaa!
Trigger happy keyboardist that I am... D'oh!
Pageant proponents are always saying these things are scholarship contests and they're more about poise. Whatever. This at least punctures the assertion that pageants aren't about beauty. And while I'm on the subject, I wish they'd just give up on that. They're about hotness. Let's just drop the pretext. The emperor is in a bikini, and we all know it. Just call them future spokesmodel or future Entertainment Tonight reporter contests or something. That's what the winners usually end up doing, isn't it?
Put a male in her place, Salon. Would you still post an article about how horrible it is that the nation is laughing at this person? I highly doubt it. Her answer wasn't just off, it was nonsensical! It doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it, no matter what the question was. She spewed out some buzz words. She's in a contest that's supposed to be about judging her on many aspects, one of which being her coherence. She failed more miserably than any other contestant in history at that moment. So we get to point and laugh, not because she fits the mold of the stereotypical dumb blond, but because she made herself look like a complete idiot on national TV. If we can't laugh at that without feeling guilty for keeping women down, then go ahead and put me in the cold hearted male chauvinist pig category so I can go on living without the guilt.
Come on Salon, I know its a female-centric portion of your site, but this is something that's OK to laugh at. Don't make it a feminist issue. (And for the record, if it were me up there, I would expect the world to be laughing at me, and I would roll with it because its not that big of a deal.)
I'm beginning to think her childish, jibberish original answer WAS rehearsed. Perhaps the sponsors of this pedophile-fest have decided the time is right to stop pretending it's something besides that, and just unabashedly appeal to the sweaty old men who find this adow-able.
I used to get bullied in school for being too smart. From my perspective, it looks like Americans are always on the lookout for someone to bully. If they're not bullying someone for being too smart, then they're bullying someone for not being smart enough.
I know it is mean but -- Let's mate her with George W. and then see if the progeny can learn to talk.
Sorry if someone has already suggested that. I didn't want to read through all the letters because I am sure half of them are from guys commenting on her appearance.
The author (listed as Rebecca Traister) is incorrect. The question was not in any way a geography question. The beauty princess (not yet a queen if she is Miss TEEN USA) was not asked to show the USA on a map. She was asked her opinion of why her fellow young Americans could not find it. Whether or not she herself could find the USA and not confuse it with South Africa or "the Iraq" is immaterial. It is a problem of US education in general, not the education of one silly girl from South Carolina.
By the way, I happen to know a very beautiful blonde woman from South Carolina. I know her from Mensa, the organization that is restricted to the top 2% of the population in intelligence, so it is hardly true that all pretty blondes from the south are ninnies.
I've reached a turning point in my life. Where I find the readers of Salon as utterly obnoxious as you're average sadlyno.com-featured Republican.
Over at Since You Asked we a tidal wave of readers who are shocked - shocked! - that men might enjoy looking at naked women. While over here we have group of people tearing an 18 year old apart for the crimes of not being terribly bright and flubbing a question on TV.
Women with short necks should never wear high halter tops.
...she could be president!
Here's how it works. First, you take a single, isolated incident, and pounce on it. Then, you give it all kinds of Meaning, which it doesn't really have. This isn't just an example of a young girl giving a single dumb answer. This is a symbol for everything that's allegedly wrong with our educational system, our culture, everything. Because there's no actual factual evidence involved, these ridiculous claims are impossible to refute.
Even better is the fact that the victim of these attacks is someone who can't speak in her own defense. She's only 21, she has no platform to speak from, and given that she's a pageant contestant, she's effectively gagged. That makes her a perfect target.
Finally, Traister takes something that everyone already knows (beauty queens don't tend to be Nobel laureates) and trots out the exact same tired arguments. There's absolutely nothing new here, but all the female readers of Salon get to shake their collective heads, again, the how beastly our culture is, and for one brief shining moment, get to feel a little superior to blonde beauty queens from the South. As someone else has already pointed out, if the person who gave this inarticulate answer was, say, black and poor, nobody at Salon would say a word. But a gorgeous blonde? Let's go get her!
Of course, as it always does, reality reasserts itself. In the real world, being blonde and gorgeous is a big advantage. For whatever reason, this fact seems to just bug the shit out of Traister, who is, if you Google her and find an image of her, a reasonably pretty, black-haired young woman. What's more interesting than the story, frankly, is that this fact about human nature drives Traister up the wall. It's not news. It's not even interesting. But it definitely hits some kind of emotional nerve.
Also, speaking of ignorant, I think that if the adjective "blonde" is applied to a female, there's supposed to be an "e" on the end of it.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
