If beauty queens can be dethroned for "dating too many men," or posing nude, what hope is there for the rest of us? Clearly, these women are of superior moral virtue. I mean, just look at them! Could anyone that gorgeous really do anything wrong?

I guess that's Donald Trump's reasoning behind his consideration of the current Miss USA's bad behavior. Tara Conner was allegedly caught partying in a variety of NYC clubs, even though she's only 20 and the legal drinking age in New York is 21. (Silly Americans! Don't you know Montreal's only an eight hour bus ride away and the drinking age here is 18?) Apparently this kind of thing is bad enough that Trump, "the self-described teetotaler," is questioning her ability to...um...lead the country's beauties. Or just stand around being beautiful? Er...huh. Well, I guess that brings us to the real question: what the hell is it that Miss USA does, anyway?

According to a Yahoo! News article,

So role models can't be naughty, right? Wait a second, then why do lots of women grow up wanting to be porn stars, strippers and SuicideGirls?

The article goes on to state that

Right. So, unless you're promoting our organization and keeping us in the public's good graces so that we can sell more advertising and make more money off your pretty smile and hot body (which should never be seen naked, god forbid!), you're gonna get the boot, sweetheart.

So, why would anybody want to be a chaste beauty queen?

Oh, right:

I guess selling your soul to Trump isn't such a bad idea after all. I mean, you basically get treated like a goddess for a year, so long as you remain discreet about your sexual habits and refrain from letting people take nude pix of you for a year.

After that, of course, all bets are off.

It's just funny that we hold our celebrities, no matter how minor, to these puritanical roles, expecting them to be bright, beautiful, perky and squeaky-clean 24 hours a day, 7 days a week when most of us would prefer a girl who likes to fuck to a girl who's got "all-American" values. Can't we get past this madonna/whore dichotomy in all its many guises? Beauty queens aren't so different from the rest of us ladies (except maybe in their awesome beauty and equally awesome bimbosity). Undoubtedly, they like to get shagged rotten, too. So why should we put them on pedestals and expect them to behave like angels? Because we're giving them money and material possessions that only supernatural beings deserve?

I think I see the problem. We're trying to make gods out of mortals again, and when our mortals fail, we're pissed off. We want to live vicariously through them, to attain that state of grace we don't think we've got the ability to achieve for ourselves. So we nominate our best, our brightest, our tallest, our skinniest, our best-looking-in-a-swimsuitiest and when that girl goes out drinking and vomits like the rest of us, we're understandably affronted.

The problem is that a beauty queen is just that: she is beautiful, but she is not a goddess. I wonder what would happen if we all started to realize that these idols we manufacture are just ordinary human beings? Would we still pin pictures of these lovely ladies up on our walls and aspire to be like them? Probably. They're beautiful, after all, and just being good looking goes a long way in North American society. We'd have to start expecting these girls to solve the world's problems before anything really revolutionary started to happen.