Parents' Guide to Miss Italia Mustn't Die

MISS ITALIA MUSTN'T DIE showcases the proudly held biases of old-school men by way of the beauty pageant they've been part of for decades. Trouble is brewing as feminism and vocal younger women are seeing less benefit and dignity to such displays, and Italian public television has dropped the pageant, after years of airing it, rejecting the attitude toward women it represents. While the longtime director Patrizia Mirigliani struggles to get the show back on TV, the regional leaders seem blissfully unaware of the role they have played in caging women behind the bars of beauty standards, standards rarely applied to men. With their paunches and scraggly hair, they tell young women to lose weight, improve their grooming, and do their hair differently. They mock women's proportions. They deride large buttocks. They set eating disorder-evoking standards and care little about women's talents. They grumble at any attempts to make the pageant less of what some call the "meat market" atmosphere. They're not happy that bikinis were outlawed. For them, it seems, the more flesh the better. The pageant director inherited the whole iffy business from her father. She both resents the public view that the spectacle objectifies women at the same time that she sharply notes her 24 years with the pageant have been incredibly difficult mostly because she is a woman. She's caught between a nostalgic love of her father's life's work and her understanding that there might be something wrong with the idea of female beauty pageants.