Queen-Sized Hole —

Trigger warning: Discussion of weight loss surgery.

Beauty pageants are wrought with problems. The whole idea that we line up a bunch of women and make them compete for the title of “Most Beautiful” is pretty fucked up. On top of that, the Miss America contest has been a bellweather for shifting beauty ideals over the decades, as the winners became taller and their weights dropped around 12% since the mid-1900s. Some recent contestants have even been in the underweight BMI range  (PDF).

Thanks to Fat Acceptance, a fat pageant backlash has risen in the past decade in response to the arbitrary thin beauty standard. Ranking fat women in order of beauty was supposed to give fat women hope that they, too, could be seen as beautiful and desirable.

Whether someone chooses to seek self-acceptance through beauty pageants is completely up to them, as bodily autonomy is one of the central tenets of Fat Acceptance. But a recent short-film documentary has given us a glimpse inside fat beauty pageants and it should give women pause before staking their self-confidence on a sash and crown.

“There She Is” follows the story of two fat friends, Allison Kopach and Jenny Flores, as they compete in the Miss American Beauties Plus Pageant.

Allison (L) and Jenny reunite on their way to the pageant.

Directed by Veena Rao and Emily Sheskin, this documentary has the best of intentions, as seen in this Directors’ Statement, but the final product has some troubling aspects to it. First, Allison explains why she participates in pageants:

I think it’s important to have a pageant for plus-sized women because you try so hard to portray yourself as a positive role model, you try to portray yourself as being very confident in yourself and you’re comfortable in your own skin, where most of the time we’re not.

It’s quite foreboding to watch women with self-esteem issues turn to pageantry to fill the gaps in self-worth that have been eroded by an image-obsessed culture. Whatever confidence can be acquired from participation in a beauty contest is just a house built on sand. Yeah, I would imagine it feels great to be praised on stage while rocking your flawless makeup and gorgeous gown, but that momentary high may only last until your feet are back on the ground and some anonymous asshole calls you a fat slob.

That’s not to say that wearing makeup and gorgeous clothes is bad in and of itself. It’s not. Self-expression through fashion and makeup is completely normal and acceptable. But if your style and beauty are the only things standing between you and self-loathing, they can be a precarious crutch to rely on.

I’m also not saying that confident people aren’t hurt by the hateful words of strangers. They absolutely can be. But what distinguishes real confidence from the kind of facade confidence bestowed by a pageant is that real confidence helps you spring back from those comments sooner. Yeah, it may sting, but you can say “FUCK THAT NOISE!” with renewed strength, knowing that the opinions of assholes are meaningless. If your confidence is superficial and dependent on positive comments that counteract the negative, then the white noise of public opinion can drag you into despair.

For example, when we see Jenny on the catwalk, we hear her say, “I have had opportunities for people to tell me, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty, if you’d just lose a little weight you’d be so much better. It would be so much more enhancing. You could do so much more with yourself.’ And it really tore me down at times. But at this point in my life, I know that no matter what they say, I’m happy in my own skin.”

Click to see animated screencaps from the competition.

Jenny then goes on to explain how her weight has impacted her love life:

Being plus-sized, I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to date, but I dated Peter for approximately four or five years. He’s told me that I’m too tall and too fat to ever consider marriage, ever be any more than friends. His mom’s not a huge fan of me and those are words I could totally hear coming out of her mouth. “Well, you can’t marry her, she’s a big girl. You can’t marry a big girl.” And I’m sure that pressure was put on him, but he’s someone I trusted so much that it hurt me so deeply that I don’t want to go back there.

This is a devastating fact of life that Jenny has to cope with, while at the same time fighting for confidence in herself. She hasn’t dated much and the assumption we draw is that it’s because she’s fat. One of the few people she has dated, Peter, has told her that he would never marry her because she’s too tall and too fat. It would seem that this pageant is her way of shoring up confidence in the face of such brutal rejection. But there’s still hope that, as she said, “no matter what they say, I’m happy in my own skin.”

Sadly, by the end of the documentary, we see just how fragile her confidence really is.

SPOILER ALERT!

By sheer coincidence, Allison wins the Miss American Beauties Plus Pageant and is crowned the “Elite Queen,” while Jenny is the runner-up. If participating in pageants is a viable solution for regaining self-confidence, then taking second place in a beauty pageant seems to be the ultimate vindication that you are beautiful and wonderful just the way you are.

Allison and Jenny pose for pictures as crowned Elite Queens.

But one year later, when Allison and Jenny return to the next year’s pageant to present their crowns to the next winners, Jenny has undergone a radical transformation.

Jenny after Lap-Band surgery.

We’re informed that between the two pageants, Jenny has gotten weight loss surgery and we’re told that she has lost 52 pounds from her original 292 pound body.

Jenny tries to explain that she got the surgery for her health, not her looks. “I think that if you asked any plus-sized woman if she wanted to be healthy and a side effect would be getting skinny, any girl would be like ‘Count me in!’ but when I made the decision it had no impact.”

Clearly, Jenny agrees with the public consensus on weight (fat=unhealthy : thin=healthy), which is fine because there’s no expectation set in this documentary that Jenny is aware of Health at Every Size^® or the idea that behavior, not weight, determines health. Like most fat people, Jenny accepts the common wisdom that when diets have failed her in the past it was due to her personal failure and so a “permanent” diet (in this case, the Lap-Band) is the key to health. This is why it’s so easy for her to claim that she chose the Lap-Band for her health only, and that losing weight was just the sugar-free icing on the fat-free cake.

As I thoroughly outlined in my post on Chris Christie’s Lap-Band, the Lap-Band is hardly a healthy procedure, even though bariatric surgeons will tout the metabolic benefits as though its definitive proof of the solution that Bad Fatties have been looking for. But setting aside the objective health problems of the Lap-Band, Jenny continues to explain her decision in such a way that she admits health was not the sole deciding factor:

After making the decision about having the Lap-Band surgery, I confided in my best friend Peter, who, at the time, we were just friends, and he was very supportive. Peter had said some hurtful things to me in the past, but I love him and we are engaged just recently. It’s been a week and two days. His family is actually really supportive and I’m really looking forward to having a future with him.

With this admission, we now see that when Jenny places much importance on the support Peter, who previously told her she was too fat to marry. What influence did Peter’s opinion have on her decision to clamp an unreliable medical device on her healthy stomach? Would she have made the same decision if she were aware of HAES? Would she have made the same decision if she were truly “happy in my own skin”? Or was the confidence expressed during the first beauty pageant simply a facade propped up by the prospect of being named an Elite Queen?

Again, bodily autonomy is central and if Jenny wants to participate in beauty pageants and get a Lap-Band, that’s her choice to make. But by examining her choices, and her own words, we glimpse the underlying motivations that prompt her to make certain choices.

It seems that Jenny’s confidence suffers because she had a hard time finding love and the one man who said he loved her (and his family) also told her that she was too fat to love forever. Not wanting to surrender to their hurtful words, she participates in pageants to gain validation that she is beautiful the way she is, and she asserts comfort in her own skin, as though saying it makes it real. But after the pageant, her confidence wanes and she decides to get weight loss surgery. She confides in the one man who has shown her love and he supports her decision, and as a result of her surgically-altered body he is finally willing to marry her.

Now, her confidence is soaring once more from the validation of love. But like the validation of a pageant, it’s a facade. This new confidence is not bolstered by the pageant judges, but by her fiance, Peter, whose love seems to hinge on her weight. But what happens if the Lap-Band fails, as it has for countless people, and Jenny regains the weight? Will Peter stick with her through thick and thin, or will he begin to say hurtful things once more? If the Lap-Band fails, what happens to Jenny’s confidence?

I don’t say any of this to degrade Jenny. I’m genuinely concerned that she may be setting herself up for a great disappointment when the Lap-Band isn’t the magic bullet she was no doubt promised. And if it fails, the blame she will no doubt place the blame squarely on her own shoulders, despite the fact that even Allergan admits it’s a crap product.

Facade confidence is false confidence, and no beauty pageant or medical device can replace the long, hard work it takes to truly love your body, regardless of whether it’s “beautiful” or not. My hope is that “There She Is” will get people talking about how democratizing beauty pageants or reorienting beauty ideals will never be an adequate substitute for the kind of inner confidence that withstands rejection and hatred. My fear is that “There She Is” will perpetuate the message that the best way to shore up your confidence is by being “pretty” and finding love by whatever means necessary.

As Allison says toward the end, “Learning to love yourself is a hard, hard thing because it’s a hard world out there.” This simple truth explains Jenny’s desperation, but it also points the listener away from the pageant and toward a deeper examination of self.