Life Coaching Carrie Prejean

A life coach’s open letter to Carrie Prejean, including some suggested affirmations:

Since you’ve decided to put yourself in the spotlight by writing a book about your experience in the Miss USA pageant, and subsequently invite all forms of reaction to it, I’m writing to put in my two cents.

I don’t know you, but after reading Still Standing it seems that what you think about gay marriage is small potatoes. Your story is about so much more than that now. It’s about shining a scathing spotlight on that throwback to the 1950s -- the pageant circuit. And it’s about speaking to women with religious beliefs that seemingly clash with their healthy sexuality. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that would put you in a majority in this country.

Believe me, I know this is asking a lot at this stage of the game, but I was wondering if you might consider talking to your peeps about changing your whole media strategy. You see, you are in a unique position to deliver a message that transcends partisan politics and I guarantee you it will get you mucho press. Enough already with the “I have a gay hair dresser stuff.” That’s small time. Think big picture.

The paragraph that may do the most to capture her errors in one place is this one.

Honestly, Carrie, I can’t help but think you won in a very significant way. Not to minimize the nastiness you’ve encountered, but when’s the last time anyone on the pageant circuit cared what a contestant thought about anything? The Miss USA atmosphere you describe in your book, rife with cutthroat, catty competition, all to get the ultimate approval and attention of men (and the material rewards that come with that), is like a microcosm of what’s wrong with our societal dynamic.

Her first error here is claiming that no one has cared what a contestant thought about anything. The people running these pageants and those who follow the pageants care intensely what the contestants think. They just don't want the contestants deviating in the least from the politically correct doctrine of the pageant world.

Another big problem is the failure to understand that most of what goes on at these pageants has nothing to do with the approval of most men. Most men are not rich sleazes like Donald Trump or nasty homosexuals like the idiot who asked the question. Most men get up in the morning, go to work, make a living, and come home at night. We appreciate a fairly standard ideal of female beauty. Miss Prejean's doctor did a good job and avoided making her breasts freakishly large, but very few average men in America would ask her out after her cosmetic surgery who wouldn't have been just as likely to ask her out had she remained natural. Ultimately, these pageants are mostly about the approval of catty women like that Moakley or Moakler woman, catty men like the homosexual who asked that question, and sleazes like Donald Trump. Oddly enough, some pageants may also be about the approval of church people who would condemn a woman who wore that white bikini to a local swimming pool but somehow don't have a big problem with contestants wearing that kind of bikini on national TV.

This commentary says that Miss Prejean takes responsibility for the pictures taken of her when she was modeling. While she should take some responsibility, I disagree that she should take all responsibility. I've done a little photography and read more about photography when I was young and halfway believed that I had talent. One big point of photographic ethics was never using pictures to embarrass the model. If the picture showed something that wasn't part of the original idea laid out with the model, the ethical response was to destroy the negative. (For those under 35, negatives were part of photography in the old days. Imagine completely deleting the file to get the same idea.) For that matter, if the picture was just a bad picture, many photographers would destroy the negative. No one wanted to be thought of as a guy who made someone look bad. Somehow, that part of photographic ethics has been lost. Modern photographers seem to revel in the bad "gotcha" shot. The intent of those pictures was what they call "implied nudity," and when something causes a bit of real nudity to flash, the photographer should destroy that picture.

I agree that the church's view on sexuality may often be skewed. When I was in church, I certainly ran into plenty of people who had self-contradictory or outright hypocritical views on many sexual or relationship issues. I don't think Miss Prejean should be attacked over these things, but her case is instructive. Many churches where women are told never to wear shorts that don't come within three inches of their knees and are at least two sizes too large suddenly see themselves as her supporters because she spoke against gay marriage. If she'd been asked the typical "world peace" kind of question, many of these same churches would call her a whore for wearing a bikini and then rant about how Jesus didn't come to bring world peace.

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