All American women want to wear a tiara, but those old standards of beauty don’t work for very many of them any longer. In fact, far fewer American women could be objectively called beautiful than a mere 30 years ago, when the fat epidemic had just begun.
Enter the “Miss Plus America” pageant, a competition specifically for “plus” women. Now, American women can eat their way to the championship, scarfing down potato chips and chugging soda pop to put them in the running for beauty queen.
I’m kind of curious as to why “plus” is the term employed. Is it supposed to suggest that it’s somehow desirable, as in “that’s a plus?” Maybe it simply sounds better than “Miss Fat America,” but euphemisms have a way of becoming terms of ridicule, so it will probably backfire soon enough.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with curvy women, naturally big women, etc. But it’s obvious that these women have a great deal of body fat, and are technically obese. Obesity isn’t beautiful, and it isn’t healthy. Our aim should be to eradicate – not celebrate – obesity. However, it seems that these women’s desire to be celebrated matters more than a national crisis that is seeing children develop type II diabetes, and adults die prematurely from weight-related diseases.
