Once upon a time, I stood in the hallway with Ken before class and said, “Discussion will be interesting this week.” I had just said that Beauty Queens was my favorite book since Paper Towns, because it was the most consistently written story, with no let downs and no turns that weren’t foreshadowed if the reader has eyes to see, and he had replied that it wasn’t his cup of tea at all, and in fact he hadn’t yet finished. Beauty Queens is like that, a book where you either appreciate the problematization of current American culture (because despite the fictionalization it is this culture, the one we are living in now, no matter how much we try to insulate ourselves from its corrosiveness), or you look at the portrayal and think about how it would be altogether too easy for the message to reinforce current culture in the minds of its readers, instead of making them more aware.
The Corporation sponsors everything, in the world of Beauty Queens. Most importantly for the storyline, it sponsors the Teen Dream Beauty Pageant, which is apparent through even the structure of the novel. Every dozen pages or less, there is the print equivalent of a thirty-second ad spot, followed by a contestant information sheet for one of the surviving Teen Dream contestants, which serves several narrative purposes. First, it introduces us as readers to one of the fourteen girls whose perspective we’re following, and makes them slightly easier to keep straight. Second, it provides fourteen different commentaries on the information sheet, and its invasive and yet shallow concerns. Third, since one of the required information spots is “mention your favorite thing about The Corporation!” it provides a very relevant commentary on product placement in TV in general and beauty pageants specifically. I found the commercials and footnotes with product placement (The Corporation’s products, naturally) to be particularly amusing, especially since they became ever more desperate as the heroines of the book became more self-sufficient and empowered and less reliant on what The Corporation was hawking. The Corporation, in fact, never goes away. Even in the prologue, before anything really happens, The Corporation breaks in to plead that if this book disrupts the status quo in any way, report it to the proper authorities. Beauty Queens makes the point almost explicitly that women are only allowed to break the mold if afterwards it is made perfectly clear that they are the exception. No matter what, says The Corporation desperately, you need our stuff. You need it to be happy, or attractive, or empowered. These other women, that turned out to be empowered without product support? They were actually confused, or not normal, or warped somehow. You, though--you want to be normal, and so you need our products.
Speaking of the desperate attempt to sell products, several classmates, when they read The Corporation, read an equivalence with Disney. Me, I have no information on that particular subject, but it provides a great transition to the discussion of gender roles, both in our present world, as represented by Disney movies, and in Beauty Queens. Did you ever notice that Disney movies feature princesses? I’m sure you have--there’s even a discussion of which Disney heroines are canon princesses and which are honorary princesses. Regardless, they are all princesses, or in the end marry princes and thus become princesses despite humble birth. We have a definite mindset in this culture, that the only women whose stories are worth telling are the exceptional ones. And for some reason, exceptional women are those who are born to or marry into a life of leisure--I have seen no stories of women happy in their career, nor of women in real relationships with people they do not want to somehow fix. Adina has this hang-up, despite seeing and hating it in her mother, that given enough time she can somehow save the sweet lost boy inside the devil-may-care rogue--and honestly my favorite thing about Adina is that she figures out that saving your man from himself is a will-o’-wisp. People can never change other people, and yet so many movies have the rogue falling in love with the sweet maiden and being saved from himself. The trope is a lie.
Speaking of lies, Ken was concerned that teaching Beauty Queens in the classroom would give students an inaccurate or unhealthy view of sex. It is certainly true that sex is a subject of concern to the girls, and Mary Lou figures out during her stay on their desert island that she is not broken because sex is more important to her than the average girl. But, as we concluded in class discussion, her experience is less about sex-as-salvation and more about becoming a capable person who is confident in herself. She concludes that it is not wrong for her to feel as she does, that she is just herself, and then she discovers a person who thinks likewise. On a casual read, though, I agree on the whole with Ken--it is a close copy of our culture, exaggerated and fictionalized at a few key points, and so it is easy to miss the criticism on first glance. This book is one that requires discussion, because it is too easy to accept the underlying assumptions, rather than take the invitation to examine them. In an ironic point, the girls in the concluding chapter ran up against the same unthinking acceptance of cultural assumptions and found it grating--the news agencies seized on unsettling rumors of what “really happened” on the desert island and what it all means for sex ed in schools. And then the talk show was juxtaposed with an advertisement that blatantly sexualized and objectified women, and the girls turned off the TV with comments along the lines of, “they will never understand.” That may be an overly pessimistic view, though; we can understand, but it takes critical examination of our culture and assumptions.
The main message of the book is easy to miss, because it goes against those very cultural assumptions--women are not a singular unit, describable in the same terms with only minor variations. We--women specifically and people in general--have greater variety than advertisers like to imagine. We are not all Adina, radical feminists who would do something like infiltrate a beauty pageant in order to write an exposèe. Some of us are Tiara, and being wives and mothers is our ambition; some of us are Petra and love makeovers; some of us are Mary Lou and Sosie and Jennifer, and our sexuality is different from the norm and yet still does not define us. And some of us wish we were Taylor, who is kind of the coolest even though she is also crazy. We like to put ourselves and others in boxes, and yet if we do, we miss out on seeing ourselves as full, complex people.
Ultimately, I think that the problematic messages make Beauty Queens more relevant to the classroom, not less. If students do not learn how to critically think about their culture in high school, we run the risk of abandoning those who will not attend college. And if they cannot learn such critical thinking from a book that almost explicitly lays open the problems, where will they ever get such an opportunity again? The real world doesn’t make itself so obvious.