“Now I got mortgages on homes. I got stiffness in my bones. Ain’t no beauty queens in this locality.” – Brian May

Brian May is the lead guitarist for legendary rock band Queen, and he grew up in Hampton, England, a London suburb.

If you did not know the first thing about May, one thing you could have guessed, based on the above lyrics he wrote, is he is not from Alabama. Shake a tree branch, and two or three beauty queens are likely to fall out.

In just the last 30 years, Alabama is averaging one Miss America a decade if you include Opelika native Mallory Hagan who was living in and representing New York when she won in 2013. Besides Hagan, Heather Whitestone won in 1995, Deidre Downs in 2005 and Abbie Stockard just took home the crown last week.

Randolph County has even produced two Miss Alabama winners in the past 20 years in addition to recent winners of Miss Auburn University and Miss University of Alabama. All of these women deserve praise because the amount of time and effort expended to reach these accomplishments is significant.

Despite this being a point of pride for our state and area, I think we should consider if the idea of beauty pageants is becoming outdated.

Are beauty pageants the worst thing in the world? Not even close. For those girls and women who excel in these competitions, they can be a benefit by providing college scholarships and teaching valuable skills like poise under pressure and how to bring awareness and funding to charitable causes.

If we are honest with ourselves, however, I do not believe this is what the rest of us – who are not exactly pageant ready – tend to take away from beauty pageants. If we break down what pageants are to their foundations, we are trying to determine who is the superior female based on some set of contrived standards.

Wikipedia lists the components for Miss America which include a private interview, answering a single on-stage question, showcasing a talent or brief speech, a newer element called health and fitness where contestants demonstrate physical fitness onstage dressed in athletic wear, and modeling evening wear.

The person deemed to be the best at these tasks has a crown placed on her head and is lauded as a benchmark to which girls should aspire.

Is she superior to a young woman who is working toward her GED diploma, struggles with color coordination in her clothing choices and whose most entertaining talent would be the ability to belch the alphabet after downing a 20-ounce Dr. Pepper? I don’t think so. Just different.

Would Abbie Stockard consider herself superior to anyone else? I obviously do not know her, but I would doubt that. This may lead you to ask what is wrong with letting young women who enjoy the pageant process take part and letting those who do not enjoy pageants do their own thing.

My answer is I feel like the entire enterprise encourages judgment and comparison beyond the pageant world, especially among women.

I am clearly not a woman, but I think many women believe they are constantly trying to meet societal expectations based on clothing, behavior, and physical assets. Pageants tend to embrace these expectations and celebrate the women who can best meet them.

While men are certainly not immune from societal expectations, it seems like the expectations are less severe and perhaps more open for men to follow their own individual path.

I have, at times, wished I could be a better athlete, outdoorsman, or builder, but I have never felt especially threatened I would be judged harshly due to these or other shortcomings in masculinity. Of course, other men likely have experiences that run counter to mine.

Additionally, I think not having a Mr. America or Mr. USA competition to reinforce masculine qualities helped me avoid spending too much time focusing on meeting society’s expectations.

Let me close by saying I do not think poorly of you if you have ever participated in a beauty pageant. I hope you had a positive experience if you did.

I only worry the rise of social media’s highly curated and edited photographs and videos is putting an entirely new level of expectations on our young people to look and act in certain ways to feel valued.

Though beauty pageants have been around far longer than social media, they seem to reinforce people’s unfortunate instinct to compare their lives to others – an instinct constantly exploited and amplified by social media. Whoever came up with the old adage, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” hit the nail on the head – a skill in which I struggle.