Miss USA, Miss Utah and the PR Power of Stereotypes

Life isn’t fair. Some people are born smarter, better looking and more talented than others. It stinks, but that’s life.

So the hard-working public naturally experiences a certain level of Schadenfreude when a beautiful woman with enough confidence to appear in the Miss USA pageant goes down in flames because she flubs a question about the underlying issues of why women are paid less than men. That is an important cultural and economic question, and one that even experts struggle to explain.

But Miss Utah handled that question like a flying squirrel in the cockpit of an airborne plane.