Mr and Miss Universe
Gender contests in America
I always thought that the winners of the Mr and Miss Universe contests should be made to square off against each other. While a great deal of exercise is involved, both are aesthetic contests based on some preconception of gender acuity and fitness.
Bodybuilding exploded on the American scene in the sixties with Sword and Sandal, and Beach Buddy drive-in films. It exploded again in the early seventies with the book and film “Pumping Iron,” which introduced America to a young Austrian immigrant named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Most people don’t realize there’s a dance portion in bodybuilding contests. Called the “freestyle” or “free pose” segment, it incorporates music, movement, tableau, and muscles. There’s a scene in “Pumping Iron” where Arnold and his best friend, Franco Columbu, hire a famous ballet teacher to work with them on their free pose moves.
It was staged, of course, and completely fake. I always wondered if Arnold bedded the famous ballerina. Despite rumors of his bisexuality and appearance in nude gay magazines, Schwarzenegger was aggressively heterosexual. I got to work with him later in my twenties and thought about asking him, but since he was married to a Kennedy, I decided not to.
Arnold became obsessed with the American dream. He married, not just a Kennedy, but the niece of the President. He worked for Ronald Reagan and became the Republican Governor of California.
That he didn’t remain faithful to Maria Shriver was always interesting to me. Fundamentally beautiful and brilliant, when I saw the other woman The Terminator had a child with, I couldn’t understand it. Some men, I’ve observed, are incapable of marital fidelity. It works against their core biology.
Schwarzenegger appeared in nude gay magazines because, before they hired him to play Conan the Barbarian, he was constantly broke, and a couple of thousand dollars for an afternoon’s work came in handy. Besides, he wasn’t all that much more naked than he was in most of his films.
There are two types of beauty pageants in America. There’s the “Miss Watermelon Seed” contest, which is designed to flatter a local girl and fill out the schedule for the Watermelon Seed Festival, and then there are the for-profit festivals.
Donald Trump invested in beauty pageants, but lost money. I swear he’s the only person on earth who can actually print money and still go bankrupt. He received some criticism for bragging that he could walk into the dressing room of his contests anytime he wanted and see the girls naked because he owned them.
He only backed down from the claim when people pointed out that some of the contestants were fourteen. I guess he figured walking in on a naked nineteen-year-old was allowable and virtuous. I always found it interesting that one of his most important campaign planks was keeping transgender women out of women’s bathrooms. How about we start with keeping tiny-handed taco creeps out of women’s dressing rooms first?
The Miss Mississippi contest sometimes makes money and sometimes loses money. In Mississippi, beauty contests are a significant matter of cultural pride as we’ve produced more beauty queens than the rest of the world combined—and always will.
Among women my age, there was some disagreement about whether beauty pageants were a good thing or a bad thing. Some pointed out that it’s a great way to get scholarships and assert yourself in a man’s world. Others felt it was misogynistic and even predatory.
I always felt like I tended to believe in the misogynistic side of the argument, but as nobody ever asked for my opinion, I wisely chose not to have one. I knew plenty of girls who participated in beauty pageants. I knew more girls who could win beauty pageants if they ever tried. Among boys my age, it was generally believed that some forty percent of beauty pageant participants possessed a certain sexual negotiability.
I’m not gonna comment on my experience with that number. There mighta been some of that, though. Whether pageant contestants were in the forty percent or the sixty percent, they all had rumors about their behavior, often spread by other women. There’s a very specific cruelty in having different rules for men and women.
To my mind, strength sports were the purest of all sports. “Can you move this amount of weight from here to here? Yes or no?” “Yes,” and you win. “No,” and you step down on the podium. It’s that simple. Watching Vasily Ivanovich Alekseyev move incredible amounts of weight over his head on television, I knew what I wanted.
Bodybuilders and powerlifters share gyms and share drugs, but that’s about it. Powerlifters hated bodybuilders because they’re self-obsessed panzies. Bodybuilders hated powerlifters because we could eat pizza. Drugs were legal but dangerous as hell. In Jackson, nearly everybody got Dynabol from a bodybuilder cop. God only knows where he got it. A cop taught me to inject myself. It was all perfectly legal at the time.
I became interested in Scottish Games for a while. Having my sport match my culture was new to me. Football, it seemed to me, prepared young Americans for soldiering. Baseball prepared them for factory work. Scottish Games and Powerlifting were tests of raw manhood.
Some of my readers will tell you that Dynabol didn’t do much to improve my sexual prowess, but it sure didn’t feel that way at the time. Male hormones have the side effect of changing your emotions in tremendous ways, exacerbated by the dosage you were taking. For an unsociable child, taking drugs that made me grumpy was probably not the best idea. Plus, I was retaining water like nobody’s business; the amount of something gold, something brown, and something clear I drank wasn’t helping either.
Every time I see Robert Kennedy on television, I think to myself, “How those hormones treetin’ ya, bud?” For a guy who hates vaccines, he sure seems to love every other drug ever invented. A cousin to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife, I don’t think they’ve spoken in years.
I knew a girl who was a cousin to Mary Ann Mobley. Mobley represented everything that was good about Mississippi women, even though she lived in California. Her cousin, I thought, was miles and miles more beautiful, even if you matched up their ages, but she decided to develop her mind after a brief dalliance in beauty contests.
Most of the time when I saw Mobley out in Jackson, she was having a very visible argument with her daughter. The only safe way to witness a mother-daughter fight is through closed-circuit television. One night, I ended up across the table from them upstairs at Scrooge’s. I asked my companion if she didn’t want to join me downstairs at the bar. “No, I want to see this.” She said. Women can be pretty rough on women.
I ended up at the bar with Gary Collins. I honestly never knew where his companion, or mine, ended up.
I have a very simple definition of sport: Did you Jump Higher? Did you Run Faster? Did you lift more weight?
We used to think that women were too frail and too feminine for sports. If you look at what’s happening with women’s sports lately, we may be too frail and too feminine to compete with them.
I always stayed out of debutante balls and beauty pageants, although I did serve as escort and technical director a few times. Those things are simply not my business. As long as women are participating in them because they want to, I have literally no say in the matter.
I did notice that there’s no dance at the country club or expensive costumes for men, but I figure we had an unfair advantage in other areas, so who cares? As long as I could move this weight from here to here, I figured I proved everything I needed to. If somebody with big hair who fought it out in beauty contests wanted to spend time with me, well, that’s just fine.
