So, Amy Polumbo went on the Today Show to finally reveal the shots she’s being blackmailed with. Just to head off the blackmailer. What a scandal! Oh, what a surprise, they’re totally and utterly bland and average!
Matt Lauer asked: Why do you feel they have to see them, why are you taking this step?
Her response: I want to end this and um, with the advice of Tony as well, it’s time to reveal them.
If you scrape away the brittle top layer of heavily prepared rhetoric, and she was actually truthful on one level, she might have actually have said:
“I have to end this and um, with the advice of my media strategist, I don’t have much more time to milk this for all it’s worth so I have to just finish it off now.”
Ok, but all PR theorizing aside, my GOD – what a pointless waste of time. If this whole Miss New Jersey non-scandal publicity stunt isn’t just a shining example of how to create hype out of nothing for the purposes of publicity, then it’s an example of how ridiculous and bipolar America is when it comes to sex and culture.
There’s obviously something oddly gratifying, though, about forcing a beauty queen to at least perform humility and embarrassment because photos of her private life are being broadcast. On the Today Show she really had to essentially apologise for being human, repeatedly. The fact that they lingered on each shot to the point where Lauer had to reasonably ask them to speed it up (partly because she was just so uncomfortable and he was probably bored) showed just how ratings were built up by simply dragging her through the mud again and again. Her boyfriend bites her breast in a photo and she has to quickly qualify that he’s actually intelligent (because a straight guy biting his girlfriend’s breast means he’s not?), she’s sitting there with her legs in the air and she talks about how she and her friends like to re-enact SNL skits (it has to be bland and comedic), all the people in her photos are her “best friends” and at the end, she had rehearsed for a play with one of them so they had deep artistic intimacy. This is all almost entirely because, as a beauty queen, America will not accept or tolerate her as human – she’s a heavily constructed inhuman sex object.
It’s actually not so grueling to watch because of Amy Polumbo’s personal anxiety or motivation at all. What’s grueling about this is that while it’s entertaining, it’s as entirely ludicrous and hypocritical of America to demand this from a person in her position as it is for someone to aspire to be it.
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