Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
No one can say just yet how consequential the #MeToo Movement will prove to be. But the Miss America pageant’s announcement last week that it will scrap its iconic swimsuit competition (above) is a major development.
Feminists have been protesting beauty pageants for decades – most famously in 1968 when, as the New York Times recounted this week, “the swimsuit-wearing beauties of the Miss America pageant were confronted with a spectacle on the Atlantic City boardwalk: 100 feminists throwing bras, girdles, curling irons, false eyelashes and other “instruments of female torture” into a trash can labeled ‘Freedom.’”
Twenty years later, Susan Faludi profiled a member of the next wave of protesters, Ann Simonton, a former model who opposed what she saw as the objectification of women by popular culture.
Beauty pageants allowed Simonton to play the role of social justice prankster, as Faludi reported in the opening of her piece which ran in the April 1988 issue of Mother Jones:
The first year the Preying Mantis Women’s Brigade went after the Miss California Pageant, they kept it simple. There were only four women in the group then in the beachside town of Santa Cruz, the beauty contest’s home for 56 years. The four friends wrapped raw meat in red ribbon and flung the greasy surprise package on stage – during the televised swimsuit competition. Emboldened by live coverage, the women returned the following year, in 1981, in costume, a parody of glamour in dime-store wigs, caked-on rouge. Each year the brigade’s ranks grew, until the women numbered more than a thousand. And each year the “Myth California” protest, as the women came to call their event, became more extravagant, more bedazzling, more, well, more like that other event. … On a warm June evening in 1982, Ann Simonton traipsed down one of the main streets of Santa Cruz in her tiara, a fetching vision in high heels and a clingy evening gown. On closer inspection you could see that Simonton’s formal was in fact stitched from 30 pounds of bologna and pimento loaf; and the sash said not “Miss California,'' but “Miss Steak.” Stray dogs caught the drift right away and tailed her closely.
Faludi’s article goes on to tell a darker story about deep pain and raised consciousness. Simonton’s beauty led to modeling jobs beginning at age 14. By age 18, she was a star performer for the Eileen Ford agency, earning “as much as thousands of dollars a week, $20,000 for one commercial alone, and was showcased in Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and Bride’s.”
She was also the target of unwanted attention from older men. On the day after her 19th birthday in 1971, she was raped by three men at knife point in New York City.
That crime, and the women’s movement, gradually led Simonton to question her remunerative profession. Faludi writes:
When Simonton talks about modeling now, at the age of 35, her voice still trembles, tears well up in her eyes. “My humanity was taken away,” she says over and over again, in her many speeches and television appearances. “I was nothing more than a mannequin to them. I was a nobody.”
Still, Simonton could not escape the camera, especially after she began working with the activist/artist, Nikki Craft. Faludi reports:
By the time Simonton met her, Craft’s high-shock-value stunts were known all over Santa Cruz. To protest the damage done to women from dieting binges, Craft staged a “public vomiting.” To assail Hustler, she built the Porn Machine, a giant bronze dildo that sprayed a buttermilk and Cream of Wheat goo on girlie magazines. …
Soon Simonton was devoting all her free time to helping Craft and pouring money into Craft’s projects. For their first demonstration together, a protest of Hustler, Craft wanted to make a poster depicting male readers of pornography trampling on a woman. She talked Simonton into lying down for the shot. While camera motor drive whirred, three men each placed a foot on her, holding a sign saying, “We Stand On Our First Amendment Rights.”
“That was really hard on me,” Simonton says slowly, reluctant to be critical of her friend. “But at the time, I was still in the mode of being too scared to speak up.”
Then Craft turned her attention to nudity laws. Which she argued were simply a way for the state to take control of women’s bodies. She talked an at first dubious Simonton and several other women into removing their shirts in public. “It attracted more private video cameras and male photographers than I’ve ever seen,” Simonton said. “Our audience began to cheer.”
