ANTM = America's Next Top Mockery

So, tonight is the finale of America's Next Top Model (ANTM to those of you who actually watch it). I semi-followed the second season, but I hadn't really given to hoots since then, until this season, the show's 8th cycle, which I inadvertantly got hooked to when I was finished exams before all my friends and consequently had no one to hang out with alluc.org. Anyway, I was never really a fan before because the girls never made it. It was a pointless competition because the winner never goes anywhere. I hate to break it to you, but these girls are all at least 18 and most are in their early twenties. That's too OLD to make it in modeling. Seriously. You have to start at like 14. They want wrinkle-free, line-free, pre-pubescent poles to model clothes. If you have charisma and skill, you have a one in a million chance of going from model to supermodel and having a long-term career like Kate Moss, but most girls are finished in this industry by their twentieth birthdays. Starting at 22 just isn't gonna get you anywhere. Furthermore, if these girls actually had the potential to make it as a model, they would show up at an agency, have a brief interview and get hired. They wouldn't need some silly reality contest just to get a contract with Ford Models.
Despite the fact that I KNOW these girls won't make it and there's no point in pretending, I can be entertained when watching. The show has a lurid watchability. Perhaps it's how pathetic it is that makes it like a car crash on the high way - people are hurt and it's so sad, but you can't look away! ANTM hurts people. Tyra lies and pretends they'll make it, but none of them ever show up as the new model in Chanel or Armani ads. They don't do runway for Louis Vuitton or Gucci or even for Betsey Johnson and Cynthia Rowley. They simply disappear. Watching the show, I already know all these girls, including the winner, have already disappeared into oblivion. They come to the show to escape poverty, single-motherhood, hum-drum mid-western lifestyles and unsatisfying romantic relationships because Tyra Banks promises them the world. She promises the final 14 they have a shot at winning, and that the winner will be a superstar. Then the editors to their magic and cut the girls into catty, uneducated, unlikeable, unintelligent baffoons to maintain the show's ratings. By the 8th go-round of this show, it's obvious that the only one becoming a superstar from this show is Tyra Banks and the other judges who harshly critique the girls every week for not living up to their "Top Model Potential," when they know that if any of them actually had that, they'd be top models already.
Tyra Banks is associated with numerous charitable foundations to increase the self-esteem of young women with troubled lives, and yet multiple times a year, she herself ruins the self-esteem and plays on the ridiculous hopes of a group of young girls before millions of viewers. How hypocritical, is all I can think while watching! But how comical it is, as well, when Dionne doesn't really get why aboriginal Australian dancing differs from American hip hop moves, or when the one college-educated contestant per show smirks at the others for not understanding the definition of anorexia or how Congress works. She smirks and laughs at the poor girls who often are ignorant because they are under-privileges in a US with a huge class-divide, and I'm not proud of this, but I often smirk along. It's a group of women who aren't actually going to make it as models who are also really ignorant. It's certainly a catty self-confidence booster on my part.