Most of you haven't been paying attention, but Miss America is in a pretty bad way.

They've got a lot of problems over there, but the reason I can assume you haven't been

paying attention is that's the biggest one.

Nobody really cares anymore.

First televised in the mid-1950s, by the 1960s Miss America's annual broadcast captured

roughly three-fourths of the National Television audience, at which point they were probably

already screwed, even if it took a while for anyone to realize it.

Like Bob Dylan and maybe Abraham Lincoln said, you just can't please all the people all

the time.

There are several ways you could view the beginning of Miss America.

One is in 1921, a year after women started being allowed to vote.

Local business owners in Atlantic City decided to boost tourism by throwing a swimsuit contest

to remind everyone of the role women were supposed to serve in America.

And one way to view how women finally gained real support for being allowed to vote after

50 years or so of trying is they got dressed up and made up as if to attend a prestigious

ball, then paraded their smiling faces through cities and towns to prove an interest in the

body politic wouldn't affect their interest in the body beautiful.

They did this because one of the ideas holding suffrage back for so long was the fear political

involvement would lead women to abandon the roles and aesthetic society expected of them,

from poised and polite behavior to wearing makeup and feminine fashions.

Basically, a lot of people worried women who were allowed to do things only men did would

start acting like men across the board.

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