Three leggy women, two blond and one brunette, sashay across a glitter-ridden stage. Cheesy music blares in the background, tears begin to flow, hands start waving to a feeble attempt to stop the flood gates. And a new Miss America is crowned.

Satirized in movies such as Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), questioned in newspapers and chatrooms, and mocked openly by sarcastic teenage boys everywhere, the Miss America pageant is seen by many as silly, old fashioned, or downright offensive.

However, beyond the clichés and the tongue-in-cheek references to the pageant as a “scholarship competition,” there must still be some legitimacy to the yearly competition. After all, the pageant has lasted this long, regardless of great changes in the American society and entertainment industries in the last century. To what extent the pageant has grown and adapted to large cultural changes may be at the heart of its relevance today.

Although the pageant has been a part of mainstream culture in America since its inception in 1921, it has had its fair share of ups and downs in terms of cultural relevance. Still, Elwood Watson, Professor of History and Cultural Studies at East Tennessee State University and co-editor of There She Is, Miss America: The Politics of Sex, Beauty and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant (2004), believes that “the pageant is alive and its going to survive. It has made it through the Great Depression and World War II, the modern women’s movement, the Vanessa Williams scandal. I think as long as there are girls who like to dress up, then there is going to be a pageant.”

Such key moments in the pageant’s history have not only defined the competition as we see it today, but also had larger cultural impacts. The most famous example of the pageant intersecting with greater societal trends is the now infamous protest that took place in Atlantic City 1968. This protest, according to Watson, also coincided with a decline in popularity of the pageant, for with the implementation of a televised broadcast in the late 1940s, “the 1950s and 60s was the height of popularity the pageant, but in 1968 Pepsi dropped its sponsorship and it [the pageant] began being seen as old and outmoded.”

For several reasons, the Miss America pageant provided the perfect platform for feminists to burst on the scene, an opportunity that perhaps never would have been provided had the pageant not been televised. However, for women and self-proclaimed feminists such as Catherine Byrne, Manhattanville College class of 1970, watching the pageant was mandatory as a young girl, but by the time the protests hit, “I don’t recall them, as I was too busy studying to get my degree.” Even at the height of its bad press, many Americans paid little attention.

The feminists of the time (and today) attacked the chauvinist nature of the pageant, its one-dimensional standard of beauty, and by default, the standard of value for American women. While these arguments are certainly valid, feminists sought to change not only the pageant, but more importantly institutions and societal norms.

Byrne, who went on to get a PhD in Polymer Chemistry and work for such institutions as the United States Army and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agrees, stating “women are by nature concerned about physical beauty as a way to attract men and …the Miss America pageant is a manifestation of this natural behavior.” To this end, the pageant in many ways reflected the values most Americans (theoretically) held regarding the more delicate sex; this fact can help explain the continued presence of the pageant in mainstream society today.

The resilience of the pageant’s popularity can be seen in another memorable Miss America moment was the case of Vanessa Williams. Ten months after being crowned Miss America in 1983, nude photos of Williams surfaced and were eventually printed in Penthouse, leading to her very public resignation. Despite the aftermath of her win, Williams is still remembered today as being the first African-American woman to win the pageant, and has been able to build a successful singing and acting career off of her fame, despite the bad press.

The question remains as to whether the Miss America pageant is still important to the lives of Americans, and whether it will ever gain back the same prestige it once had. To some extent, every culture praises physical beauty and prowess; at least these girls get some college money out of the deal.

As Byrne points out, “I am strongly in favor of the opportunities that pageants may offer to young women for employment after the pageant, for opportunities in entertainment and in the media and even in politics. I am also strongly in favor of scholarships for continuing education as prizes for as many of the contestants as possible, maybe not just the winners.” The issue of relevance again comes to the forefront, however, when she points out that there are “similar opportunities for young women to gain self confidence and experience in competition and in front of audiences in athletics… I don’t think that beauty pageants are as effective in promoting good physical health for the long term.”

Indeed, much of the popularity of the pageant came with the introduction of television; Miss America was very much a visual pleasure for many Americans. However, with the decline in popularity of network television and growth of other mediums, not much has changed in the specific case of the pageant.

As Watson pointed out in a recent article for The Philadelphia Inquirer (“Miss America Stumbles,” January 27th, 2009), “over the years, the Miss America Pageant has remade its image many times over in an effort to regain the kind of popularity it enjoyed in the mid 20th century,” but with multiple channel changes and “all sorts of gimmicks” in the last few years, it is still questionable whether these efforts are productive.

It is not all bad news for pageant supporters, however. Viewership has not been on a steady decline for the last forty years, but instead has experienced several resurgences. Watson also sees the organization making serious attempts to stay in line with cultural transformations. In the 1990s, for example, contestants began to adopt platforms, and “contestants were expected to have a sense of political awareness, such as Miss 1993, Leanne Scornette, who campaigned for increased AIDS research and awareness. They are the type of things you didn’t traditionally associate with Miss America, they were non-traditional platforms. “

Still, changes will need to be made for the Miss America pageant to continue with success into this century. For Watson, “the Miss America pageant was ‘reality television’ before the genre existed. Now it must decide what it is going to be – a question it has struggle with in recent years.” Several aspects of the pageant must be changed.

The Miss America website, for example, is an accurate reflection of the ways the pageant has attempted to adapt to the changing media landscape, but the effort is too little too late. The substance of the website’s content leaves something to be desired, as bios of past winners , even back to 1920s, include passing mention of Stanford and Oxford degrees, as with Gretchen Carlson-Close (1989), but are sure to sum up each contestant by their current personal situation, years of marriage, and number of children.

Even with changes made to the publicity surrounding the pageant, however, it may be too late. Evelyn Zhang, a college senior at West Point Military Academy, follows the news online the majority of the time, and prefers reading about events in blogs to watching them on TV. Views of feminism have changed, where even a female in the army does not consider herself a feminist, as “it carries a heavy connotation of a set of guidelines you strictly live by and believe in; I feel like feminists feel like there is still much to improve on in terms of female appreciation, whereas I am perfectly happy with the status of females in today’s society.”

Zhang also consciously does not watch the pageant, because in her opinion it “has horrible hosts who are super trashy, the contestants don’t represent real American women at all, and it’s definition of talent and beauty are out-dated - since when does someone who wants to represent America and do good service need to be a size 0?”

In “Miss America Stumbles,” Watson makes the argument that “the talent segment of the pageant is among its most crucial elements. It is the vital ingredient that has distinguished the Miss America Pageant from its competitors and imitators, such as Miss USA, Miss Universe…although the swimsuit competition may be more popular, the talent competition is the force that affords the pageants real legitimacy.”

In a somewhat ironic twist of fate, it seems as though the very aspects of the pageant which women fought against four decades ago may be the very parts keeping it afloat in a tabloid saturated world, where we increasingly know the dirty details of celebrities personal lives. With all the modern degradation of women posted daily on the internet, and series such as Girls Gone Wild topping the sales charts, the Miss America pageant now seems tame by comparison. It may be the fact that the traditionalism which has been put forth by the pageant may be its downfall, but not at all in the way we expected.