Melissa King Video Reaction, Is It Time We Stopped ‘Slut Shaming’ Beauty Queens?

The Melissa King video is the latest sex scandal to hit beauty queen culture, and the aspiring Miss Teen USA from Delaware “resigned” from her duties after a video on the internet surfaced painting her as less than our virginal ideals for young adult women.

And with the Melissa King video comes the reminder (second time this week) that women are really only as valuable as their purity — and like with everything else, we’ll only really be tolerate as long as we are “good girls” providing a model for the “children” to reject sex in all its forms. Melissa King, your job is to sit down and look pretty, not make choices that may involve sex!

The Melissa King video scandal comes on the heels of the high-profile and skin-crawl-inducing “We Saw Your Boobs” bit at the Oscars. In case you missed it, host Seth McFarlane and ostensibly the others involved in putting the show together took all the award-winning, successful women in the room and made them the subject of a montage of clips in which their breasts were bared. Humiliating, callous, crass and not even funny, the bit was not just creepily not consensual (because the women weren’t really able to opt out without potentially hurting their standing with the Academy), but also a reminder that no matter how far you get, you’re really just a pair of tits to us. Ha ha ha. 

Enter Melissa King. King is the latest in a line of beauty queens forced to “resign” over sexual behavior, certainly not the last. (And by the “resignation,” the trend of force and coercion continues — not only are these women clearly “fired,” but the pageant officials never own their decision to do so and instead pawn it off on the ousted woman. Disgusting.)

And again the message is clear — Melissa King can sell her body in sanctioned settings, submitting to the indignities of the pageant culture without reproach. But when she owns her own body, and uses it as she wishes for sexual reasons, that is just unacceptable.

Pageants like the Miss Teen USA one Melissa King affiliated with are horribly sexist in and of themselves — but they could do a lot better for women, at least in allowing them to live their lives as they see fit outside the auditorium.

Do you think it’s high time women like Melissa King were allowed to make personal choices without the interference of pageant officials or the possibility of an end to their careers?