Gender Fascists Hijack Mrs. Oregon Pageant
A great big Toot o' the Hooka to Portland's Mayor Potter for his courageous stand against gender fascism by refusing to endorse the Mrs. Oregon Pageant.
In a thinly veiled attack on the Gay and Transgendered Community, the pageant has now officially restricted itself to females who were born without penises and are married to members of the Oppressor Gender. The same right-wing lunatics who are destroying America with their religious idealism have apparently hijacked the annual pageant and turned it into some sort of beauty contest.
This is nothing new. Last year, the mayor cut his vacation short over the pageant's new "No Mustaches" rule, which essentially disqualified 3/4 of Portland's female population. He sees this as just another attempt by the evangelical Christian right to shove their warped ideas about gender roles down everyone's throat. However, while I agree with his views, he's unfortunately prancing at the wrong windmill. The pageant's bigotry and intolerance are merely the unwanted stepchildren of our culture's archaic and unrealistic fascination with "beauty".
In a society where illusory concepts like "grace" and "charm" are used to define "beauty", what hope does a 300-pound belching bull dyke with Wayne Newton hair have to win the coveted crown? What chance does an androgynous meth addict with three teeth and an adam's apple the size of a grapefruit have against the anatomically correct, cookie-cutter Barbie dolls of the master race? The mayor can cry until his mascara runs, but it won't change the hegemonic stranglehold the gender purists have on our culture itself.
I'm sure that our Founding Fathers, with their powdered wigs and frilly-sleeved zoot suits, would yearn for a more inclusive pageant, one that celebrates our differences and isn't tainted by the mediocrity of established gender norms. Ideally, a diverse panel of judges comprised of angry butch lesbians and gender dysphoric hermaphrodites would judge contestants by more progressive standards of "beauty", such as Most Alluring Monobrow, Most Convincing Tracheal Shave, and Most Likely to Be a Strategically Shaved Monkey. Extra points will be given to the contestant who spits in the eye of every traditional concept of "feminine beauty", and makes Ed Asner look like the goddess Aphrodite. Then, once all beauty pageants have been liberated from the oppressive binds of conservative ideology and opened to all Americans regardless of gender or lack thereof, we will ban them entirely because they're glorified meat markets that exploit women.
