Miss Hypocrisy

Ignorance is bliss, or so they say. I was reminded of this saying recently while rewatching a 2000 rom-com classic, “Miss Congeniality.” The movie I watched in my basement with my sister years ago was funny and sweet, a fabulous collision of the worlds of an FBI agent and a beauty queen. Watching it again, however, I couldn’t help but notice how the story’s premise was actually quite problematic and reinforced damaging gender norms. 

Oh, gone are the days when I watched Sandra Bullock’s makeover scene with envy. Back then, I was oblivious to the way her value was attached to her appearance and adherence to norms of beauty and femininity. Gone are the days when I would sing loudly along to the chorus of “She’s A Lady” during the closing credits. Back then, I didn’t realize how lines such as, “Well, she always knows her place” and “Well, she's never in the way/Always something nice to say” implicated an ideal of female subservience. Gone are the days when I confused the film’s messages of “ugly girls can be pretty” and “pretty girls can be smart, too” for empowerment. A tale that had once seemed innocuous—about how Gracie Hart became Gracie Lou Freebush and saved the day—now left an unpleasant, sickly sweet taste in my mouth. Like rotting fruit.  

The reason these realizations bothered me so much was not just because “Miss Congeniality” champions pizza as the bulimic girl’s rebellion or because it tries so hard to present itself as a celebration of strong women (it’s not a beauty pageant; it’s a scholarship program!), but because watching it played into my greatest fear. I know when you ask most people what their greatest fear is, they’ll probably say something like failure (hi Duke) or snakes (hi Mom). While I try my best to avoid both, my greatest fear is something else: hypocrisy. If I truly advocate female empowerment and the abolition of prescriptive gender roles, how am I still entertained by a movie that delineates a narrow standard of female beauty and makes light of sexual harassment? My greatest fear is to discover that I’m nothing more than a hypocrite, just a fraud with lofty values who in fact stands for nothing at all.

A friend echoed a similar sentiment to me the other day. We were riding in her car back from a political rally for congressional change because we are woke girls, and we care, and we do stuff. We talk the talk, and we walk the walk, baby—no hypocrites here! But in the car, my friend mentioned that she’s scared to rewatch one of her favorite childhood comedies, “White Chicks.” The 2004 movie bears similarities to “Miss Congeniality,” this time juxtaposing the world of FBI agents with that of the Hamptons’ high society, mixing in a lot of race and gender comedy along the way. Asking anyone my age will find that “White Chicks” is a certified classic; it still shows American youth that black men are good at dancing, fighting and yo’ mama jokes, and that white women are obsessed with shopping, status and body image. So as much as we can all marvel at Terry Crews’ pecs, you can understand why my friend is worried that one distasteful joke too many will ruin the movie for her, forever. It was a bit of a relief to hear someone else haunted by that same fear of hypocrisy.

However, that car ride sparked a thought: if I hadn’t watched “Miss Congeniality” again, then I may never have realized how much of the media that I consumed growing up reinforced harmful views of the marginalized groups in our society. And yes, watching “White Chicks” now may “ruin it” for my friend, but that would only be because it was rotten all along. We may not have before, but now we recognize what rotten fruit tastes like. All grown up, now we recognize that sickly sweet tang of sloppy racial commentary and false empowerment narratives. Now we recognize that the shiny peel of a feel-good comedy is enough to disguise a rotten core, so biting all the way in may be the only way for us know that we should spit it back out again. 

In a society where a tweet could start a nuclear war, the messages transmitted by our media have more power than ever before. Consuming media while wearing our social criticism glasses (what’s the opposite of rose-colored?) is necessary to pinpoint the portrayals that have gone uncriticized for too long, even in the wokest of minds. All our lives, often without knowing it, we’ve been consuming rotten fruit, bad apples and unconscious prejudice, and it is high time that we weed them out. Ignorance is bliss only if our idea of bliss is remaining infected with poisonous bias. And we are infected, try as we might to hide from it with our fear of hypocrisy. 

As we discover the flaws of our world and aim to fight racial profiling and sexual discrimination and toxic masculinity and all of the other bad, bad things, there will inevitably come times when we realize that we too are implicated. There will inevitably come moments when we must acknowledge that we too are participants in a system that perpetuates what we hate. There will inevitably come instances of realization that we died laughing at “White Chicks,” that we told a friend to toughen up and “be a man,” that we acquiesced to problematic norms by failing to defy them outright. 

Rewatching “Miss Congeniality” elicited one of those guilty moments for me. But strangely, it didn’t bring my beliefs tumbling like Jenga to the ground. Rather than feeling like Miss Hypocrisy, I feel like I am finally tackling the contradictions in my life and trying to get rid of the rotten fruits within my reach. And I know that we will only be better for it.