Toning It Down

THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT is no longer the miss America pageant. It has become something else, whatever it might be. A competition, perhaps, to display the most refined social skills, emotional IQ, and general perspicacity? Americans are renowned for their lack of communication skills. We talk over, around, past, and simultaneously, but rarely with. In deference to this cultural characteristic, the girls'll be asked to demonstrate their social charms, their ability to alternately transcend and conform to the national behavioral norm. Texting and tweeting will become discrete categories of skill assessment. Gone, come September, will be the swimsuit competition, one and two piece alike. No more negligees, and no more high heels. Vicarious would be sexual predators, all across the fruited plain, will be changing channels. We are becoming more correct, politically, socially, sexually, socio-economically, but, most of all, let us hope, sexually. The "Me Too" movement is impacting the fundamental fabric of salacious American society. A Victorian renaissance looms large. The full length, shapeless black dress, sans buttons and neckline, highlights the slender ankle contest. My father bragged to me that he could bend his secretary over his desk any damn time he wanted too. I believed him, and still do. That sort of behavior was not uncommon in less open times. In nineteen forty Miss America was promoted as a dazzling display of buxom, curvaceous cuties. America is a land where capitalistic sexual exploitation for profit runs head on into our prudish, puritanical past - and present. In the land of fantasy, sex and sin mix marvelously, dangerously. Mr. Weinstein began his career a few decades too late, when the casting couch was replaced by sexual harassment. The day may come when we finally decide whether we wish to be without sexual restraint or without sin. our European role models have found what seems a suitable balance. Surely there exists a balance suitable for us.; we just haven't found it yet.