Miss South Carolina is a beauty, not a brain

By: Caroline Mojonnier

Posted: 9/4/07

For anyone who missed the infamous video of Miss South Carolina answering a question during the most recent Miss Teen USA 2007 pageant, let me give you a brief overview:

When asked why she believes one-fifth of the U.S. population could not accurately locate the United States of America on a world map, Lauren Upton used phrases including "The Iraq" and "U.S. Americans" while bumbling through a brief but inexplicable mention of education in the countries of South Africa and Iraq. That's pretty much all you need to know. It wasn't pretty.

When she attempted to clarify her answer on NBC's "Today" show last week, she at least spoke in complete sentences. But I don't think we should rush to judgment.

Maybe she unwittingly answered the question by making obvious the problems in the United States' education system. It's more likely that she had an articulate answer but was just a little flustered.

Syracuse University senior Nicole Pagano was crowned Miss Pre-Teen New Jersey and can understand the pressure.

"I definitely know how that feels," Pagano said. "It's really nerve-wracking because you're standing in front of all those people and it's televised."

Pagano's pageant was similar to the Miss Teen USA pageant, where contestants modeled evening gowns and went through interviews.

Various versions of the 48-second clip of Upton's answer add up to more than 17 million views on YouTube.com. Viewers collectively found the time to leave a little more than 48 thousand comments, ranging from cruel to pitying. Spin-off videos became almost as popular as the video itself.

"I just feel bad because she may not be the brightest girl, but it's all over YouTube," Pagano said.

SU Women's Studies Chair Linda Alcoff said she felt sorry for Upton, but she believes pageants are "outdated and demeaning." She said the women's movement helped bring about the interview portion of the program, but it is not given much importance.

"It's really a façade," Alcoff said. "It's not a promoted part of the contest."

Either the judges were terribly sympathetic or they didn't really give much credence to the interview portion of the competition, either. After that embarrassing moment, Upton still didn't place last out of the top five - she was fourth overall.

A lot of people probably couldn't help but laugh at Upton as she stumbled through her answer. Heck, I couldn't. But I also don't expect Cindy Crawford or Eva Longoria to provide me with intellectual insights into the state of education when asked off the cuff, under the spotlight and in front of millions of viewers.

Upton probably trained for a large portion of her 18 years of strutting around a stage in a variety of bikinis and evening gowns, and that's fine. Can't we just celebrate beauty for beauty's sake? We all expect our Miss Teen USA to be well-rounded and an inspiration to young girls across the country, but this is first and foremost a beauty pageant.

Caroline Mojonnier is a bi-weekly columnist for The Daily Orange. She can be reached at clmojonn@syr.edu.