Throughout Netflix’s three-part America’s Next Top Model docuseries, Tyra Banks, Ken Mok, Nigel Barker, and the Jays (J. Alexander and Jay Manuel) explain away a lot of the show’s more troubling aspects as products of the time. And yeah, it’s comforting to think that the body-shaming, casual racism, and sexual harassment that defined a lot of ANTM’s most memorable moments would never happen today. But is that actually true?
In many ways, society is already on a backward slide to the darkest cultural aspects of the early-aughts. As a millennial, let me say, that’s terrifying.
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, which premiered on February 16, makes a point of highlighting how the show was received differently by viewers in 2020 than it was when it was originally on air, from 2003 to 2018. “A lot of people who are part of the next generation, they didn’t watch it back then,” Banks says while a montage of young creators respond with shock and disgust to some of the body-shaming that was rampant on the original ANTM. “It went from a thing that everybody loves to, like overnight, ‘Look how wrong this is.’”
Throughout ANTM’s run, models were subjected to on-air weigh-ins and had their bodies mercilessly critiqued during judging. Rather than fighting this system, or even fighting Janice Dickinson, Banks would sigh sadly and tell the women that this was just the way the industry worked. Perhaps they should try taking the bun off of their burger next time.
Some 20 years after the first cycle aired, Banks and Mok justified their behaviors and decisions by saying that was simply how the fashion and entertainment industries operated at the time.
Keenyah Hill, who was interviewed for Reality Check, was subjected to particularly brutal body-shaming on America’s Next Top Model. Hill was also sexually harassed by a male model on a photo shoot, which was featured as a storyline on the show. At the time Banks told Hill that she should have used her “feminine wiles” to shut down the harassment without disrupting the atmosphere on set. In her Reality Check interview, Banks said that she knows now that Hill needed more support from her.
“We all now understand the protections that women need, so I say to Keenyah, boo boo, I am so sorry. None of us knew. Network executives didn’t know, and I did the best that I could at that time.” This is also the implied reason that producers never intervened to stop Shandi Sullivan’s apparent sexual assault. That it was simply a different time.
Banks almost always cites the era. This was an era when Fear Factor and Survivor were popular, and that’s why they pushed challenges to extremes. This was the era of “heroin chic.” This was an era before #MeToo. “Looking at that show through the lens of today, it’s like, ‘Ooh why did you do that?’” Banks says at the end of the series. She promises to grow from the criticism.
Likewise, reactions to the docuseries online largely agree that ANTM was uniquely a product of the time, and that society knows better now.
The problem is that, as a society, maybe we don’t actually know better. Maybe, in fact, the hard-won gains millennial women fought for are on the brink of slipping away before our very eyes. While it's easy to claim the moral high ground, to (rightfully) condemn the show as one of the culture's most egregious examples of misogyny gussied up as empowerment, it’s harder to recognize that we’re in the midst of a backslide. And harder yet to find a way to do anything about it.
Theoretically, the body-positivity movement would prevent a recurrence of the fat-shaming in America’s Next Top Model. Body-positive and body-neutral influencers have thrived on social media over the past decade, and plus-size models like Ashley Graham have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. But now, in the age of Ozempic, plus-size influencers are suddenly finding themselves with less and less influence—or even with backlash. One former influencer, Gabriella Lascano, has gone so far as to retract her body-positivity stance in The New York Times, claiming that the movement became “an excuse to ignore how big I was getting,” rather than a rebuke of rail-thinness as the norm.
The return of Y2K fashion goes hand-in-hand with the Ozempic era, bringing with it a return of extreme thinness on runway models and romanticized eating disorders. Instead of finding “pro-ana” content on chatrooms and in America’s Next Top Model, women and girls today are finding it on TikTok or X.com. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, the rate of eating disorders among college students surged 13 percentage points between 2013 and 2020. Slowly, it seems, the glamorization of ultrathinness has crept back into the zeitgeist.
In a new report, former ANTM contestants and employees recount horror stories from their time on the show.
Similarly, it seems impossible to believe that what Sullivan and Hill endured would be allowed in a post-MeToo world, but so many things are allowed in a post-MeToo world. How many men named in the Epstein files have actually been held accountable? How much casual misogyny do we let slide on a daily basis from our most powerful leaders? While a lot of people on social media have come out in support of Sullivan and criticized the show and its producers, there are others who are just as confidently asserting that she is no victim at all. While some concrete gains were made by the movement, the cultural backlash that has followed feels almost like a counterweight at times.
If we really are committed to living in a better society than the one we remember from ANTM, we have to recognize these injustices as they happen—not just with the privilege of hindsight. You can’t treat a disease without diagnosing it first, and you can’t progress as a society without calling out its evils. You know how they say those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it? Well, if we don’t do something now, we’re heading right back to the early ’00s.
