Dustin and Kandice were robbed.
When I first saw the pageant queens of this season's Amazing Race, with their blown-out blond 'dos and aggressive grins, I had to suppress a snort. Dustin ("Dee") and Kandice roomed together at a Miss America pageant and have been BFF's ever since. According to their official show bio, Miss California’s and Miss New York’s highly original reason for competing on the Race was “to see the world and share this experience with one another."
I immediately fell into the old trap of assuming that because these women were stereotypical blond bombshells, they must also be stereotypical air-heads. I’m willing to entertain the argument that beauty pageants can be a great way to pay costly tuition bills, but I still think there are better, more noble and even more efficient ways to earn money for school than yodeling onstage in sequin dresses and modeling swimsuits in stilettos. While some contestants may think they’re exploiting the pageant system for their own personal gains, the truth is that these ridiculous events and the women who participate in them are still promoting outdated, sexist ideas of feminine beauty and grace. They’re silly, and I assumed Dustin and Kandice would be, too. I figured these ladies would meet the same fate as Megan and Heidi, the model-pretty towheads from Season 7 (also former roommates) who scampered around cluelessly with “PINK” scrawled across their sweatpant-clad butts and got booted after only a few episodes.
Now that Season 10 has drawn to a close, I’m still not convinced that Dustin and Kandice are using their Miss America winnings to pay for doctoral programs at Oxford. However, I will concede that their smiles weren’t the only aggressive things about them.
From the get-go, the beauty queens showed that they were out to take this game and its million-dollar prize. They didn't waste time forming fake friendships or flirting with other contestants (even though there could have been a genetically appropriate love-match with the Male Models, Tyler and James). That's not to say that Dustin and Kandice didn't flirt at all -- much to the consternation of their competitors, they batted their eyelashes and paid compliments in order to snag cabs and score personal tour guides.
But they didn't stop there. Dustin and Kandice had obviously trained hard for the contest, and were in excellent physical shape. They raced every leg, and didn't complain about hauling heavy objects (like mattresses) or performing less-than-graceful stunts. When Kandice took a scary tumble off a horse in Mongolia, she jumped right up and assured everyone she was okay. Both women were a lot braver rappeling face-first down a skyscraper than most of the other contestants (including the hot-shot hetero Male Models). They tried to be on-the-ball with the directions --sometimes even requesting them in the native tongue of their host country. Most impressively, despite their put-together public images, these two women never hesitated to get as sooty, smudged, dirty or sweaty as necessary. While some viewers may have thought the beauty queen's strategies (like edging out other teams at the airline ticket counter or withholding valuable information) were sneaky and cold, I thought they were being smart, tough competitors. Their hard work paid off: they often came in first on individual legs of the race, and their elimination was more due to bad luck than anything else. They played fair (if not nice), they kept a positive attitude, they treated other teams with respect (if not with saccharine sweetness), and they showed support and encouragement for each other to the end. They acted like winners.
That's a lot more than I can say for the other girlfriend pair that made it to the end. Lyn and Karlyn are two single moms from Alabama, and their racing strategy was all about lovin' the Lord and hatin' on their fellow teammates -- especially those "Barbies" (as they referred to Dustin and Kandice) with their "boobs hanging out." Like me, they originally assumed the beauty queens were just two pretty faces, but unlike me, they never came around to see that it was more than "boobs" that were helping Dustin and Kandice get ahead.
Lyn and Karlyn also cut lines (in Finland) and withheld important information from other teams. They zoomed gleefully past other teams who were waylaid by car trouble. However, they made a big deal about meeting such "good friends" like the Cho brothers and the crowd favorite, Kentucky couple David and Mary. They formed an alliance with both of these pairs, only to screw everyone over when it mattered. In between pining for their kids back home, complaining about the difficulty of the tasks, and ignoring or making snide remarks about foreigners, Lyn and Karlyn took advantage of the kindness of others while refusing to show much in return. And of course, as soon as the Single Moms' enablers were eliminated (the Chos), so were they. Good riddance.
Lyn and Karlyn are the first all-female team to make it to the final leg of The Amazing Race. It's a shame that the first female duo couldn't also have been the best and most deserving women in the race.