Case study: eating disorders and Top Model
Channel: ikat381
Date: 2010-11-10

http://www.realitybitesbackbook.com

Jennifer Pozner compiled these clips as part of her critical study of reality television's warped and backwards representation of gender, race and class.

Visit the Newsweek link below to see Pozner's list of "Reality TV's 9 Worst Stock Characters"

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/11/reality-tv-s-nine-worst-stock-characters.all.html

Pozner uses to clips collected above to present an example of stock character #6 -- "The Beauty-Obsessed Waif"

Here's Pozner's writeup for the clips:

"Reality TV tells women that beauty is the most important--perhaps the only important--thing they have to offer. On relationship competitions, the beauty-obsessed waif (the only type of woman allowed on network dating shows) appraises her competitors and worries, "They're beautiful, gorgeous, and skinny! Everything you would never want to go up against ¬ that's intimidating to me ... Am I going to measure up to these girls?" The fear of not measuring up is literal on America's Next Top Model, where girls have been weighed on scales like cattle at a 4-H fair, their measurements plastered on the screen for the world to see. Frighteningly underweight models are praised for gangly physiques and jutting bones. In the above clip, a tall, slender teenager named Cassie Grisham admitted that she practiced self-induced vomiting after eating because she believed it was the only way she could have her dream career. "An obsession with my weight" propels her to throw up "sometimes," she acknowledged, noting that she worries about food "24/7." After playing her eating disorder for melodrama over several episodes, Top Model sent her to meet with fashion-industry insiders and cherry-picked their most cutting criticisms for maximum humiliation. As she walked for Nanette Lepore, the designer's snide critiques ("She's not exactly a size 2!") were plastered in on-screen captions. Designer Marc Bouwer pronounced her hips and thighs too big for his clothes, then whipped a measuring tape around her rear and pronounced her unacceptable, while she stood mortified, an experience that almost definitely reinforced her eating disorder. Then she was promptly eliminated, supposedly because she didn't "want it" enough."