Views On Vassar | Mr. Vassar pageant reinforces male stereotypes

Tendai Musakwa Opinions Editor

“Get your jungle juices flowing” is one of the advertising hooks that the Daisy Chain is using for Vassar College’s annual male beauty pageant, Mr. Vassar. The group, in a lascivious e-mail announcement, encouraged Vassar students to go to the event to “see Vassar men in all their glory.” The concept of parading a human being, whether male or female, is degrading and objectifying. If some group at Vassar were to host a Miss Vassar contest, even if it were a “light-hearted” event like the Mr. Vassar pageant claims to be, the whole campus would erupt in an indignant feminist uproar. That a college such as Vassar, which claims to foster “personal integrity and respect for others” in its students (according to the College Catalogue), is hosting such a debasing event is hypocritical and untenable.

The supposed purpose of the Mr. Vassar pageant is to “mock and contort the conventional practices of subjugating women in American society,” according to the Senior Class officers organizing the event. We all agree that females have long been objectified in society and that we should promote gender equality in order to improve this situation. However, are men supposed to be degraded as women are in order to achieve this equality? Turning men into sexual objects does not lessen the pain of women who live with objectification every day. Even though Mr. Vassar is touted as “a parody of beauty pageants,” ultimately students go to the event to see guys in swimsuits and to appease their media-enforced (think Sex and the City) mentalities of men as sex objects for amusement and pleasure. While the objectification inherent in beauty pageants is less raunchy than that present in the media, it is more brazen. A film with a blond and buff MI6 hardman can be sold as “entertainment” and a billboard of a half-naked soccer star could be written off as “marketing,” but there really aren’t any words to mask parading men around a stage to be judged. This can only be described as objectification in its purest form.

Next comes the issue of humor and how the contest is primarily supposedly about fun and laughter, and not a serious judgment of the individuals involved in the show. Although the platform on which Mr. Vassar is judged is basically who among the contestants can woo the crowd the most, ostensibly by humor or “talents,” this comes at the cost of being objectified. One of the posters for last year’s Mr. Vassar flaunted the winner as having “beauty” and “talent,” a person who would be regarded as a “sex symbol.” Whether intended as humor or not, statements such as these promote the male stereotype prevalent in society. Consciously or subconsciously, this upholds the “ideal man” standard of perfection perpetuated in the public: the man with a well-defined jaw, a sculpted figure, a huge bulge in his crotch and a never-ending supply of humor.

If you think about it, the only purpose of a pageant, even a humor-oriented one like Mr. Vassar, is to show oneself off. Surely Vassar students are better than parading themselves around in a fashion characteristic of the lower forms of the animal kingdom? Apparently not. It would have been almost plausible that the Mr. Vassar contest is just for humor if it did not have a swimsuit and formal wear modeling event—but it does, just like all other demeaning beauty contests. Showing oneself off is humiliating on its own, but when it is done in humor it is even more debasing. People laugh at the individual concerned rather than at whatever quips or funny roles he might have used to please the crowd. It is even more demeaning for whoever attends these shows and gets pleasure out of seeing these people debase themselves.

There is no real rationale to the Mr. Vassar contest other than to use stereotype-enforced yardsticks to judge the personalities and physical attributes of the contestants. Rather than just write off the pageant as an opportunity to have fun watching a bunch of guys get up and make fools of themselves, we should examine the sex-typing connotations inherent in the contest and ask ourselves whether these typecasts are what we want to promote as a college.

The Mr. Vassar contest promotes stereotypes that Vassar students would vehemently oppose in other contexts. We should revisit some of the activities we organize on campus to see whether they adhere to the values and ideals we aim to uphold as a college.