Miss USA and the privilege of mental health Beautiful young women are given a free pass

“There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was Taylor Swift, or maybe one of the latter-day Instagram poets. The line originally appeared in one of the philosopher’s more obscure notebooks, and obscure it might have remained, if it hadn’t been so perfectly tailored to the age of the aesthetic inspirational quote. What beautiful surfaces did Nietszche have in mind? Who knows; who cares! The line slaps, that’s what matters: it’s practically begging to be stripped of all context and tattooed on a millennial’s ribcage, remixed with a “dark academia” Canva template and posted to Tumblr — or, as was the case last week, acting as the headline for the resignation letter of a teen pageant queen from New Jersey.

“After careful consideration, I’ve decided to resign as I find that my personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organisation,” reads the Instagram post from UmaSofia Srivastava, the 17-year-old winner of the 2023 Miss Teen USA title. Although Srivastava described her decision as months in the making, many were struck by its suspicious timing — just days after the resignation of the 2023 Miss USA winner Noelia Voigt, who announced that she was stepping back from her duties to focus on her mental health. A coincidence? Maybe, but between the reference to “values” in Srivastava’s post and the ominous tone of Voigt’s (“Never compromise your physical and mental well-being,” she wrote), the general impression was one of impending crisis, and of the pageant queens fleeing an unstable structure on the brink of collapse.

A week after their announcements, the sense of scandal lingers, with interested parties glued to the drama as though it were a glittering spectacle all its own. This is entirely in keeping with the broader role of pageants in American culture, where the notion of depth, terrible or otherwise, beneath the beauty queen’s jewel-encrusted gown and plastered-on smile has been the basis for blackly funny satires (see: Drop Dead Gorgeous, Insatiable), as well as the entire reality show oeuvre represented by Toddlers and Tiaras and its ilk. The pleasure of the pageants themselves is as much about spotting cracks in the contestants’ picture-perfect veneers as admiring their beauty and accomplishments — hence the incredible virality of moments like the 2007 meltdown of the Miss Teen USA contestant from South Carolina, who appeared to short-circuit while trying to answer a question about Americans’ lack of geographical literacy. In a post-feminist world, the entire concept of beauty queens feels like a bizarre relic of a less-enlightened era, and one that should be viewed with suspicion — which might be why it took all of five minutes for a commenter on Voigt’s Instagram post to notice that if you isolate the first letter of the first eleven sentences of her statement, you get the phrase, “I AM SILENCED”.

If it’s unclear just what this hidden message-within-a-message means, it is nevertheless spectacularly effective bait — as is Srivastava’s post with its clever use of the Nietszche quote. If you look closely at this second item, you’ll notice the ghost of a photograph, faded but discernible in the negative space not overlaid by text: a picture of the teen beauty queen weeping and clutching her heart as she’s crowned the pageant queen.

The attention-grabbing nature of these posts, with their implicit suggestion that you may see true horrors lurking beneath the surface if you examine them closely enough, gives permission to the audience to do what they already wanted to do anyway, which is look and theorise and look some more. The whiff of scandal inside the Miss Universe organisation is tailor-made for the era of what the writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls “photogenic feminism” — a catchy term to describe the women’s issues “that lend themselves to two readings, one earnestly feminist, the other lowest-common-denominator titillation”.

Whatever may have happened to these women, it seems certain that nobody would be paying this kind of attention to a similar story that did not include images of pageant princesses in bejewelled leotards and high heels. The beautiful woman in sensational and titillating peril is no more urgent a victim than a minimum-wage worker in a hairnet getting groped by her boss, but that first story is the one people want to read.

All of this is only slightly complicated by the possibility that what happened to these women may be nothing much — or at least, nothing they didn’t sign up for. The nature of the pageant circuit is such that, by the time a woman wins a national crown, she’s been sashaying across the stage at regional and county and state competitions for years. It’s virtually impossible that either Voigt or Srivastava failed to realise the nature of the business they were in, or the compromises they would be expected to make, including but not limited to the signing of contracts delineating their duties as Miss USA representatives. Some have attempted to spin these documents as a form of sexist exploitation — “This is an organisation that preaches women’s empowerment,” one former pageant winner said, sardonically — but surely an empowered woman can decide for herself whether the price of admission to any given organisation is one she’s willing to pay. The contracts may be draconian — or maybe they just feel that way to a generation that doesn’t seem to entirely grasp that there’s a difference between courageous whistleblowing and just talking shit about your boss in public — but the women did agree to sign them, for whatever that’s worth.

Indeed, how you interpret the resignations of Voigt and Srivastava probably depends on this last thing: having agreed to abide by a certain set of rules, how obliged should the beauty queens be to fulfil said commitments? The sympathetic take, of course, is that stepping down is a brave and daring sacrifice, one that sends a powerful message. The more cynical one is that they found a way to avail themselves of all the attention and influence and resources afforded to pageant winners while abdicating the attendant responsibilities — and all under the unassailable pretence of self-care.

I genuinely have no idea which of these interpretations hews closer to the truth. But what seems undeniable is that if you are a beautiful and gifted young woman, you can renege on practically anything just as long as you invoke mental health as the reason for doing so. It’s the same phenomenon we’ve seen in recent years in the sporting world, when Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles bowed out of press engagements, competition or both, citing struggles with depression and anxiety — and amid a similarly polarised debate over the difference between care and coddling.

Then, as now, questions arose as to whether we had overcorrected from the days when traumatised young women were dismissed as hysterical or attention-seeking, to the point where we were now instilling in them a complete intolerance for even ordinary and necessary discomfort. Add to this the unprecedented focus amongst young people on mental health, one that some clinicians worry is resulting in the pathologisation of everyday annoyances as crises requiring medical intervention.

It makes it difficult to know, when someone like Voigt suggests that pageant queendom was a danger to her “mental health and well-being”, if she’s truly in crisis or merely availing herself of the one socially acceptable excuse for flaking out — which in turn raises the question of whether every invocation of mental health should be taken at face value. Does it serve young women to treat the spectre of their emotional distress as simply too precious to question? Is there any scenario in which a person in Voigt’s position might still be told that her discomfort is regrettable, but something she’ll have to deal with, for no other reason than that she made a commitment and people are counting on her?

The answer to this question may in fact be “no” — or at the very least, that keeping one’s promises is no longer something we place all that much value on as a society. At one point, I tried to figure out if there had ever been a similar situation in which a man abdicated his responsibilities while citing the same need for self-care. What I came up with is not perfectly analogous to the Miss USA snafu, but nevertheless compelling: an actual prince cutting ties with an actual monarchy in the name of his mental health.

It is true that some people supported Harry in this, most crucially the ones who lauded him as the latest patron saint of American therapy culture. But there was a fair amount of gleeful mockery, too, and this seems instructive: a man may play the mental-health card by way of breaking a promise, but it won’t make him a hero. This sort of strength in fragility, and power in vulnerability, is reserved for women — and particularly for the youngest, prettiest ones. Which makes the trajectory of the abdicated pageant winners ironic, if nothing else: when the weight of her jewelled tiara becomes too much to bear, the best way out for the savvy beauty queen is to play the damsel in distress.

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Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

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