ANTM mention in Reality Bites Back
I was just wondering if anyone else had seen this.
It's about Jennifer L. Pozner, the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TVand both Tyra and ANTM are touched on quite a bit:
You devote an entire chapter in your book to Tyra Banks and 'America's Next Top Model.' Can you talk about the issues you have with Banks and her show?
Tyra Banks regularly says she wants to empower young girls, especially girls of color, to feel better about their bodies and to feel beautiful. Tyra really believes she is doing that, and, in many ways, she has helped. But I think she's exploiting girls easily as much -- if not way more -- than she's helping. I don't like to play pop psychologist. I really don't. I resisted talking about Tyra as a person for years, but I finally put it in the book. This is a woman who grew up with her formative influences being the fashion and beauty advertising industry,
The show says it's there to help young girls achieve their dream of being successful as beautiful women and wants to expand our vision of beauty to include women of all races and sizes and blah, blah, blah. Yet it reinforces eating-disordered behavior, reinforces the notion that there is a racial hierarchy of beauty in which women with lighter skin and straighter hair are more beautiful than women with darker skin and kinky hair and that if you are an anorexic teenager who finally starts eating normally, and you gain two or three pounds, somehow you are now letting down all the people who support you, and you're not treating your body like a temple, and you're subjected to days and weeks of on-air harassment [on 'America's Next Top Model.']
It's so problematic, and the thing is, she may not --I believe she doesn't -- understand the implications of what she's doing. But that is not to say I think she is innocent in the production choices. She is the one who decides whether or not we're going to see a story arc in which somebody's eating disorder is misrepresented or glorified. She's the one who does an entire episode in which she teaches the girls how to pose in pain.
Think a 10-minute segment in which she's demonstrating all the different ways in which pain can be gorgeous and sexy. Ow, you've just slammed your head against the wall! Ow, your fingers have been caught in a door! Ow, a man has just choked you! But it's beautiful!
I think the episode that was most disturbing, and it's the one I describe in the violence chapter of the book, is what I call the beautiful corpses episode where she asks all the girls to pose as murder victims, and they are all glamorously, sexily coiffed in lingerie splayed just so in a pool of blood.
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What do y'all think about this? Is everything preposterous and bombastic or is there some truth to it? (I mean, we all know Tyra's a little bit of a megalomaniac, but Stockholm syndrome? Really?)
It's about Jennifer L. Pozner, the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TVand both Tyra and ANTM are touched on quite a bit:
You devote an entire chapter in your book to Tyra Banks and 'America's Next Top Model.' Can you talk about the issues you have with Banks and her show?
Tyra Banks regularly says she wants to empower young girls, especially girls of color, to feel better about their bodies and to feel beautiful. Tyra really believes she is doing that, and, in many ways, she has helped. But I think she's exploiting girls easily as much -- if not way more -- than she's helping. I don't like to play pop psychologist. I really don't. I resisted talking about Tyra as a person for years, but I finally put it in the book. This is a woman who grew up with her formative influences being the fashion and beauty advertising industry,
The show says it's there to help young girls achieve their dream of being successful as beautiful women and wants to expand our vision of beauty to include women of all races and sizes and blah, blah, blah. Yet it reinforces eating-disordered behavior, reinforces the notion that there is a racial hierarchy of beauty in which women with lighter skin and straighter hair are more beautiful than women with darker skin and kinky hair and that if you are an anorexic teenager who finally starts eating normally, and you gain two or three pounds, somehow you are now letting down all the people who support you, and you're not treating your body like a temple, and you're subjected to days and weeks of on-air harassment [on 'America's Next Top Model.']
It's so problematic, and the thing is, she may not --I believe she doesn't -- understand the implications of what she's doing. But that is not to say I think she is innocent in the production choices. She is the one who decides whether or not we're going to see a story arc in which somebody's eating disorder is misrepresented or glorified. She's the one who does an entire episode in which she teaches the girls how to pose in pain.
Think a 10-minute segment in which she's demonstrating all the different ways in which pain can be gorgeous and sexy. Ow, you've just slammed your head against the wall! Ow, your fingers have been caught in a door! Ow, a man has just choked you! But it's beautiful!
I think the episode that was most disturbing, and it's the one I describe in the violence chapter of the book, is what I call the beautiful corpses episode where she asks all the girls to pose as murder victims, and they are all glamorously, sexily coiffed in lingerie splayed just so in a pool of blood.
--
What do y'all think about this? Is everything preposterous and bombastic or is there some truth to it? (I mean, we all know Tyra's a little bit of a megalomaniac, but Stockholm syndrome? Really?)