America's Next Top Model: Encouraging Starvation

Women are constantly exposed to photographs of women that have been altered and skewed, women who stand 5 foot 11 inches tall and women who are incredibly thin. The media, fashion industry and the like tell women that to be beautiful, they must be thin. As if it wasn’t bad enough, we now have Tyra Banks encouraging this idea of “thin is in”. The hit show America’s Next Top Model recently was advertised with a woman with the smallest waist in the world and Tyra applauded her.

Now, some places in Europe have recently decided that they wouldn’t allow sickly thin women to be in fashion shows – why? Because the fashion industry promotes unrealistic expectations for women, influencing how we feel about ourselves and what we do to our bodies.

I obviously have nothing against the model on ANTM personally, I have no idea if she suffers from an eating disorder, but it’s hard to believe that she doesn’t.

I just think it’s irresponsible for someone like Tyra Banks, who has so much influence on young women, to embrace a super-thin model when she could easily question the ideal of beauty and promote the image of healthy women.

I’m also not claiming that there is anything wrong with thin people – simply am stating that the industry and the media puts out one ideal standard of women out and ignores the rest.

A lot of young women feel insecure about their bodies, a lot of them hate their bodies and destroy their bodies. Our culture has told us that we shouldn’t eat certain things or look a certain way – it constantly reminds us that we’re not good enough. A lot of the same women tune into Tyra every week and likely will remember that episode of her talk show where she told every woman in the audience to love their bodies and their weight.

Was Tyra just trying to address the topic only because someone called her fat in a gossip magazine?

One of the judges even made a joke about eating disorders during the audition: "she's going to make Miss J eat tic tacs and watercress for the rest of the season!"

Hahaha! That’s hilarious! God, eating disorders are hilarious!

So what’s up with all of this? Why start up the controversy? Not that controversy isn’t uncommon with Tyra, Last season she went as far as having contestants wear a "blackface" for a biracially-themed photo shoot as well as having all of the models play dead with blood and everything.

Murdered women are totally hot!

It’s pretty obvious that Tyra doesn’t care about influencing young women about body image, if she did she wouldn’t be promoting the idea of starving yourself.