In Miss USA drama, comeuppance for US 'raunch culture'

That prompted the Miss Universe organization, which sponsors the Miss USA pageant and is co-owned by NBC and magnate Donald Trump, to question whether she was worthy of the crown – and to force a day of reckoning. The stated goal of the Miss Universe organi- zation is to empower strong, healthy women.

At Tuesday's press conference, Mr. Trump said he expected to "fire" Conner before he met with her that morning. In 2002, he did strip the reigning Miss Universe, Oxana Fedorova of Russia, of her title for unbecoming behavior.

But he said he believes in "second chances," and that he found Conner to be remorseful and willing to go into rehabilitation. "She left a small town in Kentucky, and she was telling me that she got caught up in the whirlwind of New York," Trump said. "It's a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple. They wanted their slice of the Big Apple, and they found out it wasn't so easy."

He also said he believed she could be a "great example for troubled people."

Such a role model is needed, some experts say, in part because of the messages being sent to young people by today's commercial culture. Those messages, they say, can exude a harsh sexuality that is often devoid of substantive human emotion.

"We have unprecedented sexuality on TV, and it's not nice, it's not loving, and it's not healthy," says Dr. Steiner-Adair. "There's a lot of disconnected sex between people who barely know each other, and often it has a demeaning, mean-spirited, and violent edge to it."

In her book "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture," Ariel Levy says she was first struck by the change in the comfort of her own home when she turned on the TV. "Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out," she writes in the introduction.

When young women get caught acting out in inappropriate ways, as Conner did, they are in fact reflecting the culture, Ms. Levy said Tuesday in a phone interview. "We tend to vilify individuals and act like they're the cause of this when, in fact, they're a symptom," says Levy.

In a way, says Steiner-Adair, what's happened to the culture is a perversion of the original feminist movement and the so-called sexual revolution.

"The original message of the so-called sexual revolution was to end sexism and to not make women prisoners to cultural norms, the virgin and a whore: You were a good girl or you were a bad girl," says Steiner. "The idea was to allow women to grow into their own bodies at their own pace and in their own time. The message to teenagers then was be yourself, be real, be you. To me that was healthy."

It's a message Conner says she wants to send in being the "best Miss USA" possible. "[The goal of the organization] is to empower women and make them the best they can be," she said Tuesday. "I plan on working as hard as I can."

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