The irony was so delicious I almost poked my own eye out in a hilarious fit of laughter the other morning while getting ready for work. The television was on in the living room and the newscaster had just passed along the dreadful news that that Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza, Miss Puerto Rico, had collapsed under the weight of her all-metal chain-link dress shortly after she was crowned Miss Universe on July 23.

In that one defining moment, she emerged as a perfect metaphor for a tradition that shackles women. Sadly, though, it’s a better bet that she chose a chain-link dress because she’s a fashionista, not because she wanted to make a political statement about how pageants exploit women and reduce them to a set of measurements and an all-American-girl answer to a silly question. After all, who doesn’t want world peace?

(And, though it’s not nice to say, the fact that fashion trumped common sense shows that pageants are more about beauty than brains. With white-hot stage lights heating up her skin-tight metal dress, it should hardly have been surprising that she fainted.)

Beauty pageants have changed a lot since 1968, when demonstrators protested the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City for parading women like cattle at a state fair to show off their physical attributes. The idea that pageants don’t objectify women is still a tough sell, but at least more emphasis has been placed on scholarships – that is, until last year when ABC dropped the Miss America pageant due to sagging ratings and it was relegated to a minor cable channel, Country Music Television.

Don’t get too excited. The bad news in what appeared to be good news is truly grim. Lisa Ades, who directed the Public Broadcasting Service documentary “Miss America,” said in an interview last year with the Washington Post that though the Miss America pageant may have run its course, its audience may have waned more because “it’s simply not sexy enough” than because a beauty pageant is no longer necessary to help women get ahead.

Beauty and feminism are not mutually exclusive. Women don’t have to wear beefy shoes and loose-fitting jumpers to be considered feminists, and The Feminist Majority isn’t a group of unattractive women who can’t get dates. Beauty pageants, even as they focus more on social issues than ever before, keep those myths alive, however. That takes some of the curiosity out of studies that show American women are less confident about their body images today than at any other time in history.

The subjects chosen by Italian artist Giorgione, whose portraits of voluptuous, curvy women in the 1500s helped define the standard for nudes, resemble today’s average-sized woman, yet many of us are anorexic-thin (happily, I am not in this group). Advertising campaigns by companies such as Dove featuring “real women” are attempting to change this, but are receiving mixed reviews who want women in the underwear to be model-thin. It’s a national obsession. Cosmetic surgery in this country is a $9.4 billion annual industry, and if a surgeon can’t fix it, it can be smoothed out with a Botox injection or sucked out surgically. We wax our legs, pluck our eyebrows, get our tummies tucked and spend about $30 billion annually on diet schemes.

This is liberation?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d sooner give up my subscription to Ms. magazine than a provocative pair of shoes, even when the V-shaped toe box squeezes my toes to numbness and the stiletto heels bring on leg cramps. I don’t mean to preach. After all, when I almost poked out my own eye, it was a mascara wand I was wielding.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director for Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.