Top Model looks ugly to the blogosphere & the media - thanks for rolling with our outrage!
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Posted by Jennifer L Pozner March 27th, 2007 |
Turns out we at WIMN’s Voices aren’t the only ones who think that America’s Next Top Model’s “beautiful corpses” episode provided one of the uglier moments in reality TV history.
It’s rare that a pop culture criticism post generates this many ripples in both the blogosphere and the corporate media, but ever since I wrote “Top Model’s beautiful corpses: the nexus of reality TV misogyny and ad industry ideology,” many of you have waved the outrage flag high and loud, leading the critique from the blog to the major media.
On Thursday afternoon, Mar. 22 I wrote:
“Ain’t nothin’ hotter than a dead girl. That’s the take-away message from this week’s episode of America’s Next Top Model, in which Tyra “I care so much about my girls” Banks & co. created the most brazen bit of ad-industry misogyny ever to grace the reality TV genre: an entire episode presenting a gaggle of underfed model wannabes as the mutilated, mangled and murdered epitome of beauty… ANTM gives new definition to the phrase “suicide girls.” The lithe lot of ‘em are arrayed in awkward, broken poses, splayed out in cold concrete corridors, lifeless limbs positioned bloodily, just so, at the bottom of staircases, bathtubs and back alleys, mimicking their demise via stabbing, shooting, electrocution, drowning, poisoning, strangulation, decapitation and organ theft (!), to judges’ comments of “Gorgeous!” “Fantastic!” “Amazing!” “Absolutely beautiful!” and, of my favorite, “Death becomes you, young lady!”
“For decades, media critics such as pioneering advertising theorist Jean Kilbourne have argued that ad imagery equating gruesome violence against women with beauty and glamour works to dehumanize women, making such acts in real life not only more palatable and less shocking, but even aspirational. ANTM’s pretty-as-a-picture crime-scene challenge epitomized the worst of an insidious industry trend that, ahem, just won’t die.
“The “beautiful corpses” episode of Top Model (a series that traffics in bottom-feeder humiliation, objectification and degradation of women in the name of fashion, fun and beauty for the deep profit of integrated marketers such as Cover Girl and Seventeen magazine) serves as sharp reminder that what millions of reality TV viewers believe is harmless fluff… is anything but.”
As I argue in the multimedia presentations I give on the college lecture circuit (contact me if you’d like to arrange a talk), we need to pay critical attention to the reality TV genre’s function as the cultural arm of the current political backlash against women’s rights. As such,
“ANTM is less a “guilty pleasure” than it is a cynical CW cashcow guilty of making product placers, and Tyra Banks, rich at the expense of not only the self-esteem of the few hungry (in every sense) young strivers appearing in the modeling competition, but of the millions of girls and women, boys and men, who watch the show uncritically, learning that unhealthily underweight, Brazilian-waxed waifs can only achieve the ultimate in beauty when they appear to be erotically, provocatively maimed and murdered (as they were this week), self-abusive (as when models were made to pose as bulimics mid-purge last season), corpses (as they were during a prior season when the challenge involved posing in caskets lowered into open graves in a cemetery).
“…Much of what passes for entertainment in this genre couldn’t be more a more blatant nexus of the worst of the ad industry’s long-held hostility toward women coupled with corporate media’s ever-present pursuit of the almighty dollar. This misogyny has been manifesting itself in print for years as advertising’s fetishization of images of beautifully beaten, raped, drugged, tortured and murdered girls… today, advertisers are advancing these same backwards notions in 3-D, in the name of “reality,” their product placement bucks allowing them to influence and sometimes even control the dialog, sets, themes and plotlines of primetime’s most popular “unscripted” programs.”
By Thursday evening, Jill at Feministe wrote, “…I think we often underestimate just how much they hate us. But they aren’t really trying to hide it, are they?” Meanwhile, Echidne of the Snakes (also a WIMN’s Voices blogger) remembered a telling Tyra truism from her judging comments during a previous episode: “Most modeling is acting like a ho but making it fashion,” noting that the ho+fashion equation often yeilds advertising in which models are “routinely portrayed as broken dolls, with vacant eyes and permanently gaping mouths, like toys flung about after the giant child who played with them has left,” and, as such, the death spread is a troublesome extension of that trend.
Later that night, A Bird in a Bottle wrote:
“Violence against women is already closely tied to sex. Pregnant women, for example, are more likely to be domestically abused than their non-pregnant peers – as many as 324,000 pregnant women annually. After car accidents, murder is the most common cause of injury-related death among pregnant women. Statistics suggest that up to 23% of women seeking prenatal care have been domestically abused; for 40% of those women, they did not face any domestic violence until they became pregnant. Seems to me like violence is already sexualized. In the case of pregnancy, it’s not because violence against women is a turn-on (as it is clearly intended in the ANTM episode), but as a means of control. But it’s all from the same assumption that violence against women is connected to — or even counseled by — women’s sexuality and the expression of that sexuality. And here I thought TV these days wasn’t political…”
Rachel on Alas linked the ANTM photos to the New York Times Magazine, which recently featured “another blatantly misogynistic fashion spread… includ[ing] women in nooses and bondage.” (Quick aside — good on you, Rachel and Musings of a Working Mom, the blogger she found those photos from! I’d been talking about that egregious NYT spread with fellow WIMN’s Voices blogger Keely Savoie the weekend it appeared, and we’d both meant to blog it up, though both got too busy. Glad to see you’ve both taken it on.) In another route to accountability, Rachel provides contact info for ANTM sponsor Sprint/Nextel, encouraging people to let the company’s Executive Services department (866-398-4606, executive.offices@sprint.com) and their Director of Consumer and Business Communications (Laura Lisec
Laura.m.Lisec@sprint.com) know that their consumers are none too pleased with their financial support of such trash.
The next day, the NYC chapter of the National Organization for Women distributed a press release headlined, “The Top Ten Sexiest Ways to Kill a Woman: America’s Next Top Model Viewers Outraged,” giving a stamp of institutional feminist ire to ANTM’s beautiful corpses episode.
By Friday morning, the news of our outrage had traveled from the feminist blogosphere to the print and online corporate press, as well as to independent online media.
The New York Daily News’s short piece, headlined, “Tyra’s rapped on gory TV pix,” implied that the gruesome nature of ANTM’s photos was befitting of NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” and quoted Sonia Ossorio, president of the NYC NOW, as saying, “Violence against women is such a reality in our society that I certainly don’t need the entertainment industry making light of it and making entertainment out of it.”
From the Daily News, the story jumped to TV Guide online and even across borders to Canada, where it was picked up by the New Brunswick newspaperThe Times & Transcript.
By Saturday, Women’s Enews included a paragraph about Top Model’s sickening spread in their “Jeers of the Week” column, noting their connection to a larger trend of ads glorifying violence against women as a way to promote everything from the salacious torture-chic movie Captivity (Lions Gate with After Dark Films) to misguided Susan G. Komen poster about curing breast cancer, in which women’s torsos are covered with taglines threatening to “punch it, strangle it, kick it, spit on it, choke it and pummel it until it’s good and dead” [”it,” ostensibly, equals breast cancer].
By Sunday, even generally anti-feminist bloviator Andrew Sullivan recognized the deeply hateful nature of ANTM’s deadly antics, linking to Echidne on his Atlantic Monthly blog.
And in today’s London Guardian article, “Model of bad taste; Should contestants on TV’s America’s Next Top Model have posed as murder victims?” (Tuesday, Mar. 27), Kira Cochrane writes:
“This intersection of fashion and violence is hardly new. Traditional ideas of femininity and female sex appeal pivot on vulnerability, and fashion heightens this with the blanket use of exceptionally thin and young models. Taken to its wildest extreme, depictions of violence against women have become a staple of fashion imagery. Earlier this month, a Dolce & Gabbana ad was withdrawn after widespread protests. It showed a woman being held down by a man, surrounded by other, apparently predatory, men. It looked the prelude to a gang rape, although Stefano Gabbana protested that it simply recalled “an erotic dream.”
“In a society where women are still regularly brutalised, raped and murdered, these depictions matter. It would be facile to suggest that someone seeing these pictures will head out into the night and brutalise women, but the widespread glamorising of this kind of violence makes real violence against women more palatable, less shocking. It provides this violence with a sick sexual frisson that isn’t just tasteless - it’s entirely unacceptable.”
Media attention to the story hasn’t been relegated only to print and the web — what began as a deconstruction and denunciation here in WIMN’s Voices has now, through the power of the feminist blogosphere (more bloggers’ comments below), become the subject of debate in several corporate broadcast outlets, from the infotainment pulp show “The Insider,” syndicated across hundreds of stations, including radio and TV affiliates of NBC and other major corporate media.
Finally, this morning (Mar. 27), a Fox News producer for the show “America’s Newsroom” contacted me at 8:30 am to appear on a morning segment about the murdered-model controversy. Unfortunately, the very tight deadline didn’t leave me time to do it, but I hear that NYC NOW’s Ossoria was able to jump in at last minute, and did well.
To me, this is a great story about the ways that feminist blogging can be used as part of an explicit strategy to positively impact public debate — moving a message not only from one blog into the broader blogosphere, but into the media at large. This is one of the primary goals of WIMN’s Voices; as we stated at our inception, Women In Media & News created this women’s media analysis group blog to “Propel our perspectives into the blogsphere at a time when corporate media are recognizing the power of blogs yet claiming women don’t exist in this new frontier,” and to “Answer the marginalization of women’s voices on the nation’s op-ed pages and in other print and broadcast news areas by positioning a diverse group of feminist intellectuals as opinion-leaders, sources and pundits for mainstream and alternative media.”
Speaking of moving messages, let me backtrack to the feminist bloggers who created the collective tipping point that led to the controversy over ANTM and the larger conversation about violence against women in entertainment and advertising.
After Feministe and A Bird in a Bottle picked up my post, the next day, Jessica from Feministing (also a WIMN’s Voices blogger) encouraged readers “to give the folks at the show a piece of your mind” by emailing a complaint with the CW to feedback@cwtv.com, while Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet wondered, “What’s the next photo shoot going to be? A skin-and-bones model splayed out on the runway where, after months of subsisting on lettuce and diet soda, her heart failed her? (Wait, they’ve already damn near done that).”
Then, in an open letter to Tyra Banks, Liza’s LiveJournal railed:
“I’m sure you and the producers thought that by playing up the fantasy that the models were victims of other models would erase the idea that men had raped or murdered the sexy dead girls. Instead, that further fosters the stereotype that women are catty, murderous bitches and, oh, how funny and fabulous that is! And to top it off, a girl who recently lost her friend was essentially told to lie there like an excited sexy dead girl and get over the death of her friend that had JUST HAPPENED! Absolutely despicable. I thought the season when Kahlen was lowered into a grave after her friend’s death was shockingly tasteless, but at least those models weren’t made up to look bruised and slashed!
By March 25, the episode was still hot on bloggers’ minds. Megan at PostPony linked ANTM’s models-murdered-for-reality-ratings photo shoot to similarly disturbing real-world ads such as Cesare Paciotti’s managled corpse, Dolce & Gabbana gang-rape glam, and Perry Ellis’s beheaded babe, giving the ads academic context:
“The “female crime victim” – that gory image that finds its way into almost every episode of CSI. The body in pieces, the body beaten to the point of being unrecognizable, the body as material that has been radically transformed through violence. This is objectification. Literally, taking a whole human being (a woman) and gutting her until she is nothing more than her body, her sex. Objectifying a woman is an act of power. You impose an identity on her – you say, “you exist only in response to my desire. Any other part of you is irrelevant.” It doesn’t matter if the woman is being reduced to a sex object, or a corpse – as long as she is being reduced. It is this reduction of women that is so tantalizing, not because it it necessarily sexual, but because it imbues the onlooker with power.”
Andrew Jaffee at NetWmd blog drew connections between the prevalance of dehumanizing images such as those pumped out in this ANTM episode and brutal crimes against women, such as the Dayton Daily News-reported murder, dismemberment and burning of a college student by her ex-boyfriend.
Going multimedia with her call for media accountability, BeansBeans’ YouTube slideshow opens with a simple declarative: “The producers of America’s Next Top Model think violence is sexy. They want you to think so, too,” then superimposing statistics about battery, domestic assault, rape, murder and the cycle of violence — and ends encouraging viewers to demand better from the CW (feedback@cwtv.com), Tyra Banks’ production company (inquiries@bankableprods.com), and sponsors CoverGirl and ElleGirl magazine.
Oh, and I should mention that my original post — which has garnered more than 30 comments (and they still keep coming) at WIMN’s Voices, was reprinted at HuffingtonPost, where comments veer from intense disgust at Top Model (”These pictures border on necrophiliac… This is sick, degrading, misogynist. Must be time for “consciousness raising” groups again.”) to trivialization, dismissive and back-handed attack (”Anyone who expects realism in fashion photography isn’t very bright. Anyone who equates this with misogyny only trivializes real misogyny. Anyone who sees this as bigotry has never faced real bigotry. Picking a fight over this is, of course, a perfect way to convince those who don’t know better that there is no real bigotry against women in our society.”)
Of course, comments that pshaw-away the whole concept of media criticism as “whining” (as did another HuffPo commenter who wrote, “women we need to stop whining about these minor issues… It’s not for you or I to judge”) are intellectually hollow, in that the crux of such argument is that analysis is meaningless, because media content is meaningless. We all know better.
Top Model’s beautiful corpses were the epitome of the media silencing of women — and I’m glad to report how loudly you all raised your voices in response. Keep posting, keep commenting, keep those letters to the editors and to CW flowing, and keep demanding accountability from media producers, outlets and advertisers. Because yes, indeed, media content does matter… and you have the right to demand better.
[PS: as always, if you’re interested in bringing WIMN to your campus or community group for a multi-media discussion about representations of women in reality TV, contact WIMN using this form, or let us know at info[at]wimnonline[dot]org ]
March 27th, 2007 17:44
Great round-up of the media around this.
I discussed America’s Next Top Model Thursday morning in my Race and Gender Class as an example of negative portrayals of women in the media. It was the morning after. The subject was mass media sexism and racism, and the students were interested.
By the time I came home that evening, I saw it on Feministe (who had linked over here) and figured I needed to post about it on Rachel’s Tavern and Alas, but I couldn’t limit it to just Top Model because that stupid NYT Magazine photo shoot was still in my head. I subscribe to the Times, so I had seen it there. Both Top Model and NYT Mag have presented similar “fashion spreads” before. I could not find the NYT Mag spread where they morphed women’s heads into walls(which was another low point). It was a few months ago–if anyone can find it I would like to see the pictures, so I can keep them to use in class. When I found working mother’s site, I knew I wasn’t the only one ticked about the NYT noose photos.
The responses have been great. Beansbeans put her slide show on YouTube, and I also thought this letter from gingermiss should also be included in the round-up. She said others could use it as a template if they want to write Tyra Banks Production company.
So today I got to class. We had moved on to another subject, and one of my students said, “This is off topic, but remember when you told us about Top Model. Well the National Organization for Women was in the paper about that. Did you see it? It’s in the media.” I was tickled to see that, but I didn’t tell her I was part of the media. LOL!!
March 28th, 2007 15:46
I also discussed this issue in my Status of Women class and my criminology class and I will do my best to discredit Ms. Banks not only for allowing this photo shoot in the first instance, but because she has not publically addressed the public outrage caused by this photo shoot as she did when someone said she was overweight. I suppose though..she spoke out because her feelings got hurt and never mind the immeasurable number of people who have been personally effected by violence.
March 29th, 2007 08:44
I’m equally mortified to learn about this and glad to be aware.
I’ve never been a Tyra or ANTM fan (although I did blog about appreciating that Tyra expressed disgust at her healthy size being called fat througout the media—which got picked up at BlogHer) and recently there’s been a lot of roundtable discussion of vanity that ties in to this disgust with a need to look a certain unhealthy way.
The regular images are troubling enough. The show is troublng enough. But this?
It’s a new league. Really.
March 29th, 2007 16:26
Please see and comment on our entry called MURDER ON THE FRONTIER at Changemakers.net. And thank you for the data about murder and pregnant women! Timely!
April 13th, 2007 10:07
[…] When we originally taped the interview months back, I discussed how, guided by the increasing influence of product placement marketers over the sets, dialog and content of these programs, the reality TV genre has become increasingly damaging in its depictions of women, from promoting dangerously unhealthy body images, to idealizing degradation and humiliation of women as the realization of “fairy tales,” to romanticizing psuedoviolent physical and verbal abuse, to depicting women as nothing more than stupid, vindictive, golddigging whores. (We taped the interview months before America’s Next Top Model made a gaggle of models pose as the murdered, mangled epitome of beauty as dead crime scene victims, but the “beautiful corpses” episode succinctly epitomizes the genre’s anti-woman ideology.) […]
August 16th, 2007 09:16
I believe that perhaps the editor and commentors of this blog perhaps took AMNTM in a wrong direction, and perhaps used this certain “dead women are hot” type of thing as in insult to women, and their rights. Now I believe what America’s Next Top Model was trying to perhaps achieve by doign this certain photo shoot is, to see if they could be beautiful even in a frusome scenario, pose, and body makeup and effects, also when women are modeled, as dead or in cascats, its i don’t believe to be taken litterally or in context. Its acting, as a dead person would in poses, and still trying to look beautiful while looking dead at the same time, which is something quiete on the contrary people find disturbing, i don’t believe they find dead women hot, infact perhaps most murders feel guilty and destroyed after they do, kill a women, or man. Also if it was a man would there be the same blog? would people be disturbed? I don’t believe so. ANTM is a competition show that allows somone a huge leep into the modeling industry, and hey, i believe somone may need a “dead scene” with the character still being beautiful such as in a criminal show, album cover etc. Its not i don’t believe an attempt to say dead women are hot, or killing women is okay, not at all, it was a learning experiance for the unexpected for them i believe, and for the casket episode that was somone’s artistic, the dead showing i believe it was either emotions or deadly sins, so i don’t believe there was anything wrong with that. To examine the pregnancy thing, i believe women get more emotional at during the pregnancy and sensative, so i suppose low patience and perhaps a troupled background could be the source of that, also on the other hand, i believe some people may be making a statement, if a pregnant women was murdered, perhaps an emotionally damaged person, but I DO believe that when anyone thinks of a pregnant women getting beat its not a happy thought in itself, but i suppose there is one more alternative, one may be looking for a way out of parenting, but those are just my thoughts on the matter, i don’t believe it is perhaps best to be critical on what they did, as dead women in itself is not a pleasant thought to i believe anyone who is somewhat stable, and to say it was is perhaps redundant.
August 24th, 2007 00:03
They’re just PICTURES. If you don’t like it, don’t look. Considering all of you close minded people out there, I admire that they did this. I think it was brave, and that there is nothing wrong with it. Get. Over. Yourself.
December 18th, 2007 15:26
I’m so impressed by the above, and the whole website come to think of it. Im just in the process of starting my media alevel coursework on the representation of women and violence against women in advertising.
Some may argue they are only adverts, but the fact is there are hidden meanings and connotations behind them, which unfortuantly some of us are too narrow minded to consider. There are people out there who are so easily influenced, and it could be these very adverts that contribute to the breeding of tomorrows criminals. Children watching this sort of thing are not mature enough to realise the hidden meanings, even though i guarantee they will effect them at some point. Look at the Jamie Bulger case- there was evidence that the 2 criminals(yes i say criminals even though they were 10) copyed what they saw in a video game- acts of torture on poor jamie
. There were reports from concerned parents and memebers of the public saying that children were copying the ‘you’ve been tangoed’ advert where an orange man was seen slapping random members of the public. This could even have been a factor contributing to the great moral panic of happy slapping. Do we want our children to become sexist or violent because they have seen this in adverts- freely aired on television, obviously society thinks it’s ok- thats why the adverts are still there. Sexist attitudes can develop at very young ages, which means childrens ideas are set in their mind for the future. I certianly would’nt want my children to become influenced by something morally incorrect. Obviously advertisers of big companies are only concerned about profits and ratings- after all they believe any media coverage is a good thing- as it gives their product more coverage.
December 20th, 2007 13:59
[…] Produced hundreds of blog posts, articles, and action alerts skewering sexist double standards in reporting on female politicians; debunking biased science journalism, such as the New York Times column on how women are biologically programmed to desire rich men; highlighting the invisibility of women in war coverage, including rape as a war crime and the again-invisible plight of Afghan women; and offering astute insights on pop culture inanities from Britney Spears’ panties to the hookups of “The Bachelor” and supposedly-sexy corpses on “America’s Next Top Model.” Our analyses often changed media coverage: for example, after WIMN’s Voices blogger Jill Nelson challenged the invisibility of Black women’s voices in media debates over radio host Don Imus’s on-air slurs, her commentary was reprinted widely and Nelson–an award-winning African American journalist–did radio interviews and was quoted extensively in regional and national media, shifting the tone of the national discussion and broadening the whitewashed opinion lineup. […]
January 20th, 2008 10:40
Rakkon - you say they are ‘just pictures’; thereby supposedly rendering them harmless.
Nazi’s used lots of ‘harmless’ pictures in the 1930’s; on posters, billboards, newspapers and picture books for children to de-humanize jews to the extent that an entire population looked the other way when the Nazi’s fired up the crematories.
Another way of looking at this is:
What if this show depicted blacks instead of models? And the images glorified were of lynchings, stylized depictions of slavery and whippings? Would that be acceptable on national TV? Not on your life, no way, no how. And slavery ended a hundred years ago.
Women are being raped, brutalized and murdered every day in this country right now, so why are these images apparently not only acceptable, but glorified and sexualized? There is something so very sick and wrong about this that I cannot even put it to words.
January 20th, 2008 10:47
By the way, I referenced this article in response to a gentleman who stated “I can’t recall violence being used to sell anything except violence.” in response to my article “Sex Sells?” on my designer blog at Graphic Design Forum http://blogs.graphicdesignforum.com/athyrius/archives/2008/01/sex_doesnt_sell.html
I could not believe that someone could actually be walking around and breathing and not be aware of this problem. This shows you the extent to which people are numbed down.
December 13th, 2009 19:47
I am so happy there are people out there in academia and in human rights organizations that feel the show is not only degrading to vulnerable and naive women but also a violation of their constitutional rights. One can say the same about any hyped-up, taboo-based reality TV show (i.e. “Real World”, “Real World/Road Rules Challenge”, “America’s Next Top Model”). Ratings are so important to the networks, thus allowing controversial ideas to be displayed. Many young people are into the latest inhumane reality TV shows for the reason it appeals to their cultural interests: alcohol, drugs, recklessly-caused fights, deceit, sexual experimentation, continuous moral conflict….the list is longer. For them they are reminded of how “fake” reality TV is. There are provided plots, character casting, daily/weekly interviews and instigation by the producers. People don’t know this nor do they care to pick up a well-researched article on the falsehood and dangers of reality television because for them on some level it is real. A woman crying over a broken, bloody ankle or a man screaming for help as he is beaten by a stranger. The camera crew catches all of this because it is their job. To elaborate, the purpose of having a cameraman on set 24/7 is to record every second of each contestant to provide ample material for editing. It is why reality television appears to be a world of its own that can be viewed by the real world for free (depends on the network).
Another issue that bothers me is the criminal aspect of the contract a contestant on a reality TV competition has to sign. Such contract is (as far as I know) excluding rights that are given to normal people (with the hidden purpose of being able to control the contestants physically and mentally). If a contestant were to call the police after being starved for a few days she would be eliminated since the network doesn’t tolerate any civil rights that could threaten their profits. Why do people join reality TV, then? It is because they are ignorant of and/or confused with the entire us constitution and the civil rights provided to citizens of the state the show is filmed in. These are people who don’t see reality TV as a hazard to their physical and mental health. For them it is a heavily edited genre that gives the illusion of danger. People want to experience new things and learn about the world. Reality TV provides this with the cost of an individual’s safety. I recommend to anyone who is considering going on a reality TV show like ANTM to do the research on the police department’s investigations of the shows vandalism and abuse (refer to the NYC stampede of April ‘09 and the vandalism of Michael Marvisi’s loft in 2008). In both events the ones who filed charges apparently forgot all about what they were mad about because Bankable productions was never taken to court! What if a girl were to be hospitalized on ANTM? Would she take Bankable, Inc. to court? Adrianne Curry, Danielle Evans, CariDee English, Heather Kuzmich and Lauren Utter have all been injured and/or hospitalized but never filed a lawsuit against bankable productions. Are they scared of losing because Banks is financially, socially and culturally very powerful? I assume they are due to the possibility of losing their modeling profession. Banks is at the top of the rank of models. She is a supermodel-powerhouse with a multi-faceted product. No normal person can serve Banks a lawsuit and win. It is impossible.
It’s horrible Banks has been able to get this far in popular culture, especially since college students and little girls idolize her for feminine strength and self-appreciation. Whatever happened to idolizing people like the civil rights leaders, the female Supreme Court judges, female governors, female scientists and female professors? What happened to the respect for women in American society? I miss the 90’s since ANTM didn’t exist back then. Now a whole new generation of little girls obsessed with Tyra Banks think she is healthier than Hillary Clinton for their personal growth.