Even This Globalized Institution is FailingAliens Are Seeing An Opportunity to Invade After Last Night’s Pageant
As all of you who follow the news know, last night our planet crowned a new Miss Universe¹, in an act of hubris roundly mocked by all extraterrestrials. The pageant has morphed, it seems, into a cosplay porn event made for tourists in Tokyo. In the kind of prank that kids play on my son at his woke, private L.A. high school to get him expelled, the Miss Universe committee has a “national costume round.” The U.S. contestant would not have made it through the front door of my son’s school on Halloween.
I’m sure it takes way more than this to get canceled in Estonia, but she gave it a shot:
This is Miss Mexico, or Miss Universe, as she shall now be known to her subjects from Andromeda to The Sombrero Galaxy, which I’m guessing was named by the people who run this pageant. Miss Mexico was a surprising choice, not because of this outfit, but because she almost brought this year’s contest down.
The guy who runs and co-owns the pageant, travel-show host Nawat Itsaragrisil, assembled all the Miss Countries in the most generic conference room in all of Thailand so he could shame Miss Mexico for listening to the pageant’s national director who had told her not to post content about Thailand. Which, obviously, she should totally do. For not doing it, he called her a “dumb head.” The future Miss Universe started defending herself from her chair when Mr. Nawat went medieval on her.
At this point, he could have said many things. Such as, “Because of that outfit I tricked you into wearing for the national costume round.” Or “Because I bought a beauty pageant.” Instead, he yelled, “Security!” The only thing I know about security at Thai hotels is from The White Lotus, but I can’t imagine you did years of Muay Thai to manhandle a model who hasn’t eaten in three days. Then, as if in a 1990s teen romcom, the other contestants follow her and walk out in protest. Which makes Mr. Nawat, playing the school principal, yell: “Sit down. If anyone want to continue the contest, step down. If you step out….” He, of course, did not have an ending to that. But he is saved by the Miss from what is now my least favorite country on earth, Bonaire. I hope Putin doesn’t invade any other countries, but if he does, I hope it’s Bonaire, and that he wins. Miss Bonaire looks at Mr. Nawat and asks permission to talk to the other contestants she’s standing right next to.
 This was followed by an even larger scandal in which two judges – a soccer player and a musician – quit because they learned that there was a secret group of judges that secretly picked the winners. I cannot imagine how insanely immoral something would have to be to get a celebrity to quit judging a pageant. This is, after all, someone with such limited morality that he agreed to judge a pageant. I know. Because I judged a Miss U.S.A. pageant. When Donald Trump owned it (along with Miss Universe. And Miss Teen U.S.A.) The experience was not quite as glamorous as I had hoped. Though they told me it was going to be in Chicago, where they put me up in a hotel, we actually took a bus to the pageant in Gary, Indiana, which is not as nice as The Music Man implied, because he was a con man. It also turned out that I had been invited to judge the preliminaries, which meant that instead of sitting with Karen Duffy, Daniel Baldwin and Ernie Hudson on television, I spent three days in a hotel conference room with Joel Anderson from Survivor, a CBS soap opera executive, and Eddie and JoBo, Chicago’s Bumpin’ B96 morning team. Our job was to whittle the contestants down to ten semifinalists. We spent the first two days interviewing the contestants for the personality portion of the contest. I never imagined I could be so bored talking to attractive women whose only goal was to impress me. I was mildly impressed by the fact that Miss Vermont had written several books, including True Beauty: A Sunny Face Means a Happy Heart, Betsy the Cow Goes to the Vermont State Beauty Pageant, and What’s All the Noise About Boys? I also marveled at the ingenuity of the contestants who, not allowed to go to a gym at night, tried to lose pounds by running up and down their hotel hallway. Toward the end of this portion, one contestant approached the panel and whispered, “Give me a low score. I don’t want to be Miss USA. These people are all phonies.” She said that her own bio was entirely fabricated, and that she couldn’t quit the pageant because her sponsors would charge her for the flights, hotel, and food, though I’m guessing the food was about $3. She was the only contestant I wanted to win, and even though I knew it would hurt her, I couldn’t help giving her a 9.99. It turns out that almost every beauty pageant has a contestant who tries to quit. I cannot believe that more don’t have judges who try to quit. The next day, the real judges crowned Miss Texas, the woman who answered my “Would you sleep with Donald Trump?” question with the misinformed, “I think he’s a little old for me.” A few weeks later, I was sitting in my office at Time when I got a call from the lobby. A woman who described herself as Miss Vermont wanted to come see me. She was very dressed up and gifted me with her books. I had to answer a lot of questions from my fellow writers. In the course of fact-checking this Substack, I learned that Miss Vermont was one of the very few people in American history to win a First Amendment case without arguing that the facts were not true. This was not against me, but against early 2000s frat-author Tucker Max, with whom she had a relationship. That case was eventually overturned. But I do not want to besmirch her good name here. Because she suffered enough just being in a pageant. As did I. 1 Formerly known as the International Pageant of Pulchritude. Even our misogyny used to be smarter. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
|
Friday, November 21, 2025
Even This Globalized Institution is Failing
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Benedict's Newsletter: No. 640
In this issue: Tim Cook, Anthropic infra, Elon Musk's Cursor/SpaceX/xAi shuffle, Meta layoffs, Lalanne mirrors, and, well, Tim Cook. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment