Once upon a time there was a beauty pageant, and it was a motherfluffing train wreck.
The feminists weren't the problem. Sure, the producers didn't love being haunted by instagram call-to-actions urging their followers to demanding the show dropped the "antiquated male pastime of judging women's bodies on national TV," and sure, it didn't help that the high-school-aged children of said producers just stared awkwardly into their dinners when their parents shared their woes instead of offering the expected sympathies, but hey, a $10 million contract was a $10 million contract.
The church ladies also weren't the problem. Their charges that the producers were heralding forth degeneracy in the holy US of A by shoving lewd material under the noses of impressionable youths and degrading women stung the more devout of the producers, who liked to tell themselves they were keeping a widely respected tradition alive, but a $10 million contract was still a $10 million contract.
The youths weren't even the problem, for the first time in the history of problems. Afromentioned instagrammers aside, the young folk didn't strike a single blow against the show, seemly unaware that it existed. Although the producers had braced themselves for the stinging online mockery that any corporation risked by attempting to keep their social media pages trendy, the $10 million contracts still seemed like easy money.
The problem was, let the haters hate all they want, but the show still needed...likers. When the contest first began to air and the lesser of the Fairest Maidens™ were sent home in waves, almost no one bothered to behold them. The viewership was at a fourth of what the executives had expected, and despite the thousands of dollars the corporation poured into advertising, no one they met seemed to know or care who was crowned the Fairest Maiden in the USA™.
"It's like I've been trying to tell you," the marketing intern said with a shrug when the three producers caught her in the hallway. "People just don't want to watch beauty contests anymore. The liberals are offended by them, the conservatives are offended by them, and you can see more skin for a fraction of the time on Pornhub. I told you, it's time to find a different project."
"No, there's got to be a way," one producer said, wringing her soft hands. "If this tanks, we'll have just cost the execs $10 million each. We'll never find work again."
"We just need to modernize it," rushed the youngest producer, a woman in her 30s who had managed to convince herself the green shine of her hair masked the uncoolness of selling out and entering reality TV. "Maybe put more money into scholarships for the girls, or double the time limit for the talent portions--"
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
"Yeah, that'll do it," the intern said between slurps of her drink. "The kiddos will love that. 'So it turns out we're at the 'strutting your stuff on TV for a desperate attempt to afford higher education without selling your soul to student loans' stage of late-stage capitalism.'"
"Maybe we could make it egalitarian," suggested the young producer. "Get some hot men from each state in speedos--"
"Oh yeah, the conservative grandmas will will have no complaints there," the intern added. "Look, we're on the edge of an increasingly polarized culture war in this lovely country of ours, and you're a show that makes money off judging women's looks. The best you could hope for is obscurity."
"Then maybe we need to go back. Back to when things weren't so complicated," the oldest producer muttered to himself, staring at the projections on the intern's computer.
"No," the intern said flatly.
But he didn't listen.
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"Hold on," Miss. Delaware said, pausing with her false lash hovering a millimeter above her quickly-drying lash line. "They're adding a new category to the competition? Now?"
"We're on in 10 minutes," Miss. Wyoming said, not helpfully.
Miss. Oregon shrugged helplessly. "Look, don't shoot the messenger. All I know is that they're going to be judging us on how well we tell "fable, fairytale, and folk stories" now. We have five minutes each."
"Do we need to tell one of each, or, like, can we choose if it's a fable, fairytale, or whatever the last one was?" Miss. Illinois asked.
"With only five minutes? I hope just one."
"Okay, I'm taking Cinderalla," Miss. New Mexico said. "I don't know what they're--"
"No, they have to be original. They don't want to have ever heard them before," Miss. Oregon clarified.
"Do they not know how folk tales work?" That was Miss. Mississippi, who was struggling with a particularly tangle-able string of pearls.
Miss. Oregon shrugged again. "They said they wanted to 'honor women's natural roles as leaders of the culture, shaping our society's morals and values through the tales we pass down.' They're judging us on the creativity, artistic quality, lesson, and cultural relevance of our stories, and said we have the potential to be 'the heralds of a movement with the potential to move mountains.' They seemed really excited."
"That gender stuff seems like a big generalization at best," Miss. Hawaii muttered from her bench.
"Look, you can complain all you want, but I need to think up some bullshit about talking frogs or something in the next ten minutes. You use your time as you wish," Miss Oregon said with a final shrug, pinning a bobby pin between her lips and turning back to her mirror. And so the conversation came to an abrupt close, and the confused women were left with nothing more than their half-finished hairdos and the sound of the clock tick, tick, ticking away.