From Deseret News archives:
Miss Idaho targets bad behavior
Like others distressed over what passes for a role model these days, 21-year-old Amanda Rammell is troubled by the influential antics of the Brit Pack: Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, whose behavior has escalated to pantyless photo ops.
"The Internet photos, the partying, the drug abuse, just the level of sexual exploiting that they're using — it's out of control, and the way our girls are looking up to them isn't changing, and that's what's scary," says Rammell, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Brigham Young University-Idaho student who represented her state in this week's Miss USA pageant. The pageant's event culminated Friday night, following a tumultuous reign for last year's winner, Tara Conner, who was caught up in a scandal of her own.
To counter the bad-girl behavior, Rammell counts herself among women leaders advancing their own campaigns, large and small, to offer good-girl alternatives.
Rammell is a curious contradiction. She's a Mormon, whose faith emphasizes modesty, yet she comes from an iconoclastic family that's not afraid to make headlines. Moreover, as a tall brunette who doesn't mind the swimsuit competition, she wants to use a beauty pageant, which some consider exploitative of women, as a platform to be their advocate.
More resolute and confident in her agenda than many other contestants interviewed, Rammell portrays herself as the product of an Idaho ranch with "the morals, the education, the down-to-earth" traditions of that upbringing, and she says that young women today have "unrealistic role models."
While no surveys exist quantifying a movement toward positive examples, adherents agree there is an urgent need for them, pointing to opinion polls such as one recently in Newsweek that indicated 77 percent of Americans believe that Spears, Lohan and Hilton are having too much influence on the nation's younger female generation.
Saturation coverage of their binges has even concerned the world's largest news-gathering service, The Associated Press, which last month staged a news blackout of Hilton for one week.
In response to concerns that "sexualization" of girls is a problem, the American Psychological Association conducted a study that concluded that such imagery in advertising, merchandising and media is "harming girls' self-image and health development." Some call it the "prostitot" trend — girls being sexualized prematurely.
