The time of beauty pageants in America is coming to an end. Or, at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

TLC has announced that it won’t renew its deal to run the Miss America Pageant, the one-time major TV event that fell on hard times over the past decade.

I’m entirely okay with that.

The pageants for young girls are freakish and the girls are a ridiculous mockery of feminine beauty. The women and girls who compete in pageants are airbrushed and perpetuate a focus on physical beauty as the standard of a woman’s value to the world.

If I were a dad, I wouldn’t want my little girl taking part in pageants. Not because I wouldn’t want her to be beautiful or to feel beautiful, but because I would want her to understand that her ultimate measure of value in the world is in the things that she does, the lives she effects, and the things she accomplished--and, just as importantly, not in how good she looks in a bathing suit.

I’m sure that many of the parents and many of the participants are good people. I’m sure many lead happy and good lives and that the pageant system didn’t do them any harm.

But what I value in life is decidedly at odds with what I believe those pageants teach young girls. If the Miss America Pageant were to die off completely, I wouldn’t shed a tear.

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