Personally, I've always found Miss America embarrassing.
If the market wants it, something else will arise to take its place.
Just wait till the winner is formerly known as Mike.
There are beauty pageants all over the world, and they’re pretty harmless. It was like “Miss Subways” when I was growing up in NY. A sort of feel-good moment (in that case, monthly, with a pretty girl who was a subway rider) for your borough or your street or your building. If you were a girl, you always wanted to be her...because she looked so pretty and nice, even if she was struggling off to work on the (then) unairconditioned trains and going to someplace that may not have been a lot of fun. If you were a guy, you probably wanted to marry her.
On the national scene, the Miss Whatever was nice, not trashy, and she’d come in waving and people would be happy.
And this was true at local rural festivals, such as the local Miss Watermelon festival a few towns over from where I live now. It was all FUN.
I liked this line in Dennis Prager’s article about the attacks: “The latest examples—in just the last few weeks—are the Boy Scouts, sculpture, and the Miss America pageant.”
The big thing that will be a problem in the next Miss America pageant is the number of men competing. How have we fallen this far?