The Body Image Blame Battle: Is the Problem “Out There” or “In Here?”

By: Kirsten Haglund
Community Relations Specialist, Timberline Knolls

Have you ever Googled yourself? What do you find? ALinkedIn profile, Facebook page and a link to your practice or company? How about when you search images? I hope your experience is not like mine, in that case. I happen to be googleable, and some of the first images that show up when you search for my name are pictures of me in a swimsuit.

That is because I competed in, and won, the Miss America competition in 2008, at 19 years old. I decided, on a whim, to compete in local pageant in my hometown for the purpose of winning some scholarship money. That decision became a quick rise – quicker than I expected – to the pinnacle of pageantry.

Becoming Miss Michigan

I won my local, won Miss Michigan, and six months later, received the title and job of Miss America. It came with over $60,000 in scholarship, so I am definitely not complaining! In fact, it was a blessing. Besides access to a great education, the job gave me the opportunity to travel and speak, raise awareness of eating disorders, share my story of recovery, and show little girls that they didn’t have to be perfect in order to be worth something.

However, perhaps for the rest of my life, I’ll have photos of me in a swimsuit freely available all over the Internet. At the time that I competed, I was proud of the body I had worked hard for in recovery from anorexia nervosa. Years later, I see that the true benefits of competing came through my platform work, meeting thousands of incredible young women, and earning the funds to graduate from Emory University debt free.

But a Google search’s first results continue to define me by my body – by the crown – by what I look like. This perpetuates a misunderstanding about pageants, and women, and in my view, points to a larger issue.

What Critics Say About Pageantry

There are many critics of pageantry. They raise some valid complaints: the swimsuit competition is an unnecessary part of the pageant, there is an emphasis on external beauty rather than on brains and accomplishment, they perpetuate a thin ideal, contributing to the development of low self-esteem and body image issues in women.

As a former pageant winner, for the rest of my life I’ll have to acknowledge these issues exist and defend the Miss America Organization, highlighting the wonderful, empowering experience it afforded me (an exercise in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy if there ever was one).

However, I’d like to debate that third complaint. Beauty pageants are not the only, and are not even the largest contributors to the body-image problem that we see in this country. They can trigger some women to struggle with poor or distorted body image and can contribute to the onset of disordered eating and other issues.

But so can the Sports-Illustrated swimsuit edition, magazine covers of fitness and fashion magazines available at every checkout counter in America, underwear models on billboards, sex scenes in movies, and Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The Media Conglomerate Behind Objectification of Women’s Bodies

Beauty pageants represent only a tiny fraction of a colossal media-corporate complex that exists to display, exploit, and objectify women’s bodies in advertisements, fashion, and the arts – and has been doing so for decades on a much larger scale. The problem isn’t pageants – it’s us.

Why is it us? Because we live in a mostly free market economy in which goods sell if they appeal to the market, satisfy a need, fulfill a desire. Advertisers work hard to appeal to some of our basest impulses in order to get us to buy products. Women’s bodies are used to sell everything from perfume, to cars, to water, because consumers are titillated, respond to these ads, and buy.

Time Magazine sells out when it puts a half-naked photo of Beyonce on the cover. It is learned behavior. The constant exposure of women’s bodies sells, it makes money, gets likes and clicks, which is why the first photos of me that show up in a search are of me in a bikini. It isn’t about pageants – it is about our society’s demand for a steady stream of images of sexy, beautiful women.

The Elephant in the Room

In essence, I posit that the criticism of beauty pageants as the largest propagators of negative body-image is myopic. The issues are larger than pageantry, even larger than “the media;” they cut straight to the heart of who we are as people, what we buy into and our values, starting with our own attitudes and actions.

On a positive note, the Miss America Organization is working to redeem pageants, seeking to empower women rather than objectify them. There is still a swimsuit competition (I’d like to see that go, though it probably never will. I doubt six-story billboards of Victoria’s Secret swimsuit models in Times Square will either).

Each contestant must have a platform that she promotes during her year of service. Miss America is also scholarship program that makes available $45 million in cash and in-kind college scholarships each year. Pageants can be an incredible empowerment mechanism. Through the job of Miss America, I found my voice and a life’s work of outreach, advocacy and fundraising for treatment to support families battling eating disorders. I used the job to try to influence attitudes toward beauty and women on the individual and corporate level. I continue in that work today.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line? A young woman doesn’t have to watch a pageant on television to learn to compare herself to other women. I live in New York; every street is a runway. Every mirror is an opportunity for affirmation or criticism. Every party is another competition for compliments, winning a proverbial “crown” for being the fittest, thinnest, tannest, most successful.

The problem is not pageants, the problem is a cultural mandate for women to exist in a box of perfection; perpetuated by the media, fashion, the arts, and by our very selves. If we want to break the cycle, we need to start by celebrating every size as beautiful within our own social circles.

By not comparing ourselves to one another. By being kind in our words and actions. By living a life of grace and acceptance, modeling that to our next generation. Ironically, that is what I had the opportunity to do throughout my year as Miss America. In a world so focused on externals, the onus is on us to bring the focus back to what matters: not the body, but the spirit. Not beauty of the physical, but beauty of the soul. No one needs a crown to do that.