Another Top Model entry, but it's different– I swear!
I viewed the America’s Next Top Model episode: The Girl Who Starts to Loose Her Cool, the episode after The Girl Who Crawls
I watched the show during its original broadcast on The CW, November 14th. As is previously stated, the show is produced by Tyra Banks, Ken Mok, and Anthony Dominucci. Banks is an accomplished runway star, talk show host, and creator of Top Model. Mok has been a part of several reality television programs that failed to garner the same success as Top Model, he also produced the hollywood film Invincible (2006). Dominucci has a long history with MTV’s The Real World, he has been a producer, a director, and casting director for the program.
The whole Top Model hour is devoted to selling. The program sells products featured in specific episodes (magazines, clothes), as well as an ideal femininity– which can be attained through buying featured products in the show and those in the advertisements surrounding the program. Commercials for a variety of feminine things surround the show: cosmetics, clothes, celebrity gossip, shampoo and body washes. There are also ads that are less explicitly aimed at women, adds for Walmart, K-mart, and cars all say “these are sensible ways for you to make your family happy during the holidays.� Not too extravagant. These adds are aimed at care givers, mothers. Ads for mops and appliances are not targeting students– high school or college. The inference can be made that kids are watching this show with their parents, girls with their mothers. This means whatever ideals are being sold by the show are trans-generational.
What ideals is Top Model selling? A hyper-femininity, both thin and young, not necessarily college (or high school) educated. In this particular episode a white executive, giving feedback to one of the contestants, said “when you spoke it was a weak moment.� To him these women are just to be looked at and objectified. There is an analogy to “hoes and sisters� in Beyond Beats and Rhymes and the difficulty the women of the Lusty Lady faced organizing, somehow women who work with their do embody an impossible feminine ideal of thin are denied things like intelligence or rights to choose how people see and interpret their bodies. Deborah Sarbin sees these ideals as “infantilizng women by freezing their appearance in their 20s,� because of the realities of aging the mothers who might watch this show with their children are denied real access to the feminine ideal the show is selling– Top Model says that some how these “normal� women are not enough woman (241). Along with making models only pretty faces, there is an incredible fat prejudice in the United States. Fashion magazines will not take a fat, or even average sized woman seriously, but model-type women are essentialized in our culture as vapid– you can’t be smart an pretty. How can any woman beat the system?
Top Model does some good too though, it rejects heteronormativiy to an extent. Featuring different gender identities without making them token. Gay and straight men are both part of the fashion industry, as are gay and straight women. On of the judges, Miss Jay, is ambiguously gendered. These different identities are embraced, which is a positive feminist ideal.