@elomtet Thank you for the inisghtful judgment and critique.

In hindsight, I do wish I'd spent more time talking about possible pageant reforms, and the reforms already happening. I'm not a fan of pageants, especially those featuring children, but being a person who loves competition, I'd hate to argue for taking it away from others on the grounds that they enjoy competing. That's the primary reason I picked up this topic.

@lupita Thank you for the succinct judgement.

@theshivatribe Thank you for your judgment and observations.

Since this gives me the winning vote, I thought I'd share further thoughts on the subject for anyone intersted.

I imagine both myself and my opponent found the same general problem when looking at sexual assault in pageants. There are anecdotal cases, but it is hard to find any hard statistics on the prevalence of the problem. Thus I think it was hard for my opponent to give us the scale of the harms, and hard for me to refute them.

It's rational to think that pageants are an environment where this can happen, but I found that it is also something they take precautions for with chaperones and the like. But none of what my research turned up made for much of a citation I could work into these very short debates or were entirely conclusive that they work or don't work.

Two days ago I knew next to nothing about pageants other than the general idea of them and that they are not popular among feminist groups. My overall take was that they are part of a much wider issue with beauty standards and ideals, but not a root cause of them. I was also impressed at what some of the winners had achieved for themselves which is why I decided to base my case around their right to find success in the way they choose.

My notion of feminism is that it doesn't help to close doors to women. What we need to do is open all the doors that have been closed to them. I think when we can do that, then women can make the changes we need and lead the way. I was surprised to hear many pageant winners went on to politics, but the article about that did a good job showing how the skills for pageants transfer very well to the skills for politics in the TV age.

I'm really not a fan of pageants myself. I find the idea of them a bit seedy and exploitive. But for me, that wasn't nearly enough reason to say others can't create or participate in them.

@sigfried BTW sigfried, are you skyping from a star trek shuttle pod?

@dorothy8532 It's an Airstream travel trailer. I've been living in it and traveling the US for the last 21 months. It does rather look like a shuttle, never thought of it that way but I love the notion since I'm a pretty big geek.

This is our blog about our travels.
http://www.trailandhitch.com/

We've hit up all but 7 states in the US now.

@qallout That might be a debate you can't win :P Here is the evidence...
http://host2.cyberears.com/13620.mp3