What's wrong with an Indian-American Miss America?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Nothing. Nothing at all.

(What's wrong with this and other such pageants? A whole lot, but that's another matter.)

New Yorker Nina Davuluri, who won the title on Sunday, is, as you can well imagine if you haven't yet seen her, is a beautiful woman. And apparently a really smart one as well. (I hate these pageants, but at least this one isn't entirely about physical objectification anymore.)

But of course, as you can also well imagine if you haven't seen it already, there are many across the country who don't think Davuluri is quite "American" enough -- you know, American as defined by, say, the KKK. Or Fox News:

It should go without saying that Davuluri, a Syracuse native of Indian descent, is neither Muslim nor an Arab. But according to Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes, the American-born Davuluri doesn't "represent American values," unlike the blonde-haired, blue-eyed contestant from Kansas, Theresa Vail.

This is not to say that Vail isn’t an unprecedented contestant in her own right: she's spent five years in the Kansas Army National Guard and is double-majoring in chemistry and Chinese at Kansas State University. But, according to Starnes on Facebook, she lost because "the liberal Miss America judges were not interested in a gun-toting, deer-hunting, military veteran."

Yes, you see, Davuluri is... different. As in, has a different skin color. And a different name. And all that. For many, she's part of the Other, and that Other is a broad category. Davuluri is Indian, and a Hindu, but the common smear has been that she's an Arab and/or a Muslim, because of course that's often what the Other is seen to be, you know, because 9/11.

The ignorance is blatant, and hardly surprising. It's bigotry, pure and simple, including when some jackass talk radio host couches it as not representing American values. If you're different, you see, you're just not American.

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Mona Lisa now

By Frank Moraes

Giovanni Carmine, an art curator in Switzerland, had an interesting idea. It also turned out to be horrifying. He took a number depictions of women in great pieces of art throughout history and altered them into our modern standards of beauty. That is: he made them painfully skinny. We aren't talking here about Rubenesque models who we know to be plump. He took women who I'd always thought of as being pretty thin -- women like the model for Mona Lisa.

I recommend clicking over to the Ensemble Magazine article, "The Mona Lisa Retouched, According to the Ideal of Beauty Now." What really stands out is how sickly the women look compared to the originals. But if you look at the new imagines for a while, you soon see that they aren't distortions. They really are what the modern world thinks of as beautiful.

And that's why it is horrifying.

Note: the Mona Lisa above is probably the least horrific of the many examples.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)