Was Tyra Banks the Villain? Or Were We?

12:54Jessica Grose:But again, I don't remember being upset about it when I was in my early 20s, because, again, I was like, well, that's just being a model. It's starving yourself. Like, that's how it is. And that is a body type that even someone who is extremely tall and willowy and, you know, a model body type, most of us don't have that body type, to maintain the standard that is the base standard when you are an actual grown woman. Intellectually, I knew that. But watching it in the documentary as a full-grown woman was really illuminating. And I think not just with the body image, there is a sexual assault that happens in the show.

13:34Jessica Grose:And I thought that was the most upsetting thing that happened. And it was very brushed away by everyone. The woman who experienced the assault, her name Shandi, is still, to this day, she's in her 40s, incredibly damaged by what happened, understandably, especially since the entire world saw it. There was no sort of reconciliation or apology. And I think there's a way not to make everything always about the Epstein files. I feel like that's just the way we circle back to them on every topic now. But it's just so, I think, a very easy association to make in this moment that there is this way in which these young women are multiply vulnerable.

14:12Jessica Grose:And so that was a really big takeaway for me watching it.

14:17Nadja Spiegelman:Yes. For the most part, for male models, it's mostly over 18 years old is when you're very viable. But for the girls, the women who are perusing through these magazines have no idea that they're looking at a 13 year old, a 14 year old, a 15 year old who's gussied up and made to look like an adult woman. And these women are having a lot of sort of dysmorphia, looking at them and saying, oh, I'm them. I see myself in them, but not realizing that they're comparing themselves. A grown woman is comparing themselves to a teenage girl.

14:47Kendall Werts:Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And it is hard not to think about sort of the currency of girls, the world of Epstein, the world of rich men, where like girlness, not womanhood, is a currency and is and is valuable. And I'm glad you bring up that moment about the assault. Jess, I think part of what was interesting for me about how the documentary frames that is that they actually in the documentary never, I don't think they ever call it assault. It's just that through our contemporary eyes, it is extraordinarily clear that that's what it is. And yet it was possible to watch that and think that girl had too much to drink and she cheated on her boyfriend.

15:23Kendall Werts:And it is the Rorschach test of like actually what's happening is the context of the culture and the perspective that you're bringing to these events. And I don't know, for me, there was something so in a way kind of healing about revisiting this because I was like, it's not just the show was bad. This is the context that I grew up in as a person who's not naturally thin, as a person who's queer, who like these are the messages I was getting from everywhere. I wonder if there was a way in which it made you just revisit your girlhood, your experience of girlhood in the early 2000s.

15:53Jessica Grose:Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's been multiple ways over the past five to 10 years where I have revisited that period, I would say like 95 to 2005. Right. And the messages that were happening, not just about what my body should look like and what it was acceptable to say about it, but, you know, what behavior was acceptable. And I think we are sort of continuing to have these conversations and it is two steps forward, three steps back. Right. And I see that actually in both directions with both the sort of Me Too affiliated understanding of consent and then also the way we think about body image and what is desirable and what is desirable beauty wise.

16:38Jessica Grose:Right. Because, you know, I do think we had this moment maybe 10 years ago where we were seeing a much broader range of bodies on the runway. We were seeing more people of different backgrounds and ethnicities on the runway. You know, Vogue did and a few other places started keeping statistics about the number of mid and plus size models on the runway. And we would see those statistics sort of start to creep up. And now they're just all the way back again. And so it's also really interesting to think about how progress is not uniform. And there's ways in which I think things are much better. You know, I would not actually watch this documentary with my 13 year old.

17:17Jessica Grose:I wouldn't show it to her. even though I watch a lot of things with her. I mean, we watch tons of 90s shows together and she is often horrified by the way people talk to each other and about bodies. At the same time, you look on the internet and you look at the comments on a TikTok of the most stunning woman you've ever seen in your life. And the comments will be like, she's mid, she's fat. And you're like, what are you talking about? This is Margot Robbie. Like, are you on track? But still, the kids, kids, you know, we're talking about teenage girls who are looking at this. They're not thinking it's bots.

17:56Jessica Grose:They're thinking like, oh, if Margot Robbie is not even pretty enough, like I must be a complete monster. Right. So it's like I think there's ways in which the progress keeps getting made, but it's not uniform. And there's always a backlash. There's always steps back.

18:11Nadja Spiegelman:In terms of diversity, my partner got me an amazing book for my birthday last year. WWD did a history of sort of the fashion business over 100 years. And so what I found by reading a lot of the articles was that we've been here before over and over and over and over again. In fact, it was Black and Jewish people, actually, who were denied sort of access into this sort of world of fashion and this world of beauty of being seen. And there was different organizations that were established to sort of bring the industry to the mat and say, you know what, it's our time. This is the time. And as soon as they would move up, they would slowly move backwards because of different moments that were happening.

18:59Nadja Spiegelman:So when I look at what Tyra was trying to do, I get it. Back in those days, the supers were ruling the runway. And these women were bold. They had body. They had personality, which I guess was distracting from the clothes, right? I guess that's distracting from the clothes, so they'll be replaced with someone who's very waif-like. Tyra was a part of that supermodel brigade, right? So she knew that her rates were drying up, right? So in turn, Tyra changes herself into someone who's more commercially viable in its way. She's abandoning high fashion and she's going to go the route of someone who is like, I am an all-American girl, not just black girl.

19:44Nadja Spiegelman:I'm the all-American girl who has personality and could be a little kooky sometimes. A little kooky. A little kooky. A little kooky. is that she was trying to answer that call with, okay, I'm going to do a casting and I'm going to have four women who are commercially viable. I'm going to have one woman who is a curve girl.

20:09Kendall Werts:There is our plus size model. Do what you can. Be gorgeous, be tall, be fabulous. Work what you got.

20:15Nadja Spiegelman:I'm going to have three models who are editorial and I'm going to have, she broke it all down in a way in which I found that the show to be really entertaining.

20:23Kendall Werts:Just what do you think? Despite the show's flaws, do you think that it played a role in bringing about such change? And do you think that anything actually has changed? Like, are the messages that your daughter is getting different from the messages that you got? What has changed and why?

20:36Jessica Grose:I do think the show absolutely deserves some credit for popularizing different kinds of beauty, for showing, you know, I don't think anyone had any idea that a plus size model was a thing. I mean, that is not what I ever saw in the magazines that I looked at. So I think she definitely deserves some credit for broadening the lens of what a model could be and should be. I think to give her some credit here, it's hard to get called out. And I think she came off as sort of seeming very resentful of the fact that people weren't giving her more credit. And it's like, we can hold those two ideas at the same time, right?

21:14Jessica Grose:That she does deserve some credit for breaking a trail for some people, but also she exploited and humiliated so many of these girls in ways publicly that were unnecessary and in retrospect really damaging to them. I would say in terms of my daughters and what I think the young girls messaging that they're getting now, it's such a mixed bag. So much of it for girls who are on social media, and this is why my children are not on social media, is determined by the algorithm, right? And so if you start liking things or interacting with content, you're just going to get more of that content. And so I don't think social media is uniformly negative for the body image of all girls, but for girls who struggle with body image, they fall down the rabbit hole.

22:00Jessica Grose:So in the piece that I wrote about America's Next Top Model, there was a study that showed that girls who have eating disorders and bad body image, they looked at their algorithms against a control group. And the images that they were getting were diet, exercise, just over like plus 100 percent more, 300 percent more than the people in the control group. So I think for kids who already struggle with these things, their experience is even worse. And for the kids who don't already struggle with these things, it might be a little bit better. But I think overall the ethos, the way that we all spoke to each other in high school, in so many ways is not acceptable for kids to do today.

22:43Jessica Grose:Like not just the body image stuff. It's just like I will watch 80s movies with my child and she will be like, they let you talk like that. in so like so many different slur ways i'm just like yeah it was wild i don't know how

22:58Nadja Spiegelman:that happened one of the things what i was thinking about as i was hearing you um jess you talking about your daughter one thing that i know that creeps through the sort of system all the time is blackface you know you're now every once in a while in a blue moon the howl goes up and some white person or somebody then put some chalk on their face and decided that they're going to be black and they're going to put it on. Yeah. That is one thing to see a celebrity literally during Halloween bring down themselves because they want to put on a little, you know, a show, you know? They want to be something outside of reach of who they are and because they put this makeup on they're like, oh yeah, I can feel the pain.

23:41Jessica Grose:Talk about how ANTM did that. That was the craziest thing to remember. So on America's Next Stop, do you want to give the context of America. Okay, so America's Next Top Model did more than one race switching photo shoot. I had forgotten all about that. To watch from now was just like, why? Why would you do any of this? Like, it was so crazy. Why would anybody be like,

23:59Nadja Spiegelman:and the way Tyra was positioning this, like, well, first of all, Jay just looked like, I don't want no smoke with this. He looked really uncomfortable even delivering this news to the girls. You could see that there was a hesitation on his face. That's round one. Now, round two, which is like what, like five or six cycles afterwards, Tyra's still at it. Tyra's actually going to show up this time and she's going to be like, oh, now you're an Egyptian and now you're an Indian.

24:27Jessica Grose:Erin, you're going to be Tibetan, like the Dalai Lama. And... Egyptian?

24:35Nadja Spiegelman:Egyptian! Like, she was like the Oprah of blackface.

24:38Kendall Werts:It's so crazy that this is what she's up here talking about.

24:44Nadja Spiegelman:And so when I look at that episode, I am mortified at the lack of anger I had. This was during a time where your anger is so suppressed in society that screaming out that you're angry doesn't really matter because no one hears your screams. So it's just all of these things that have happened in the show that are unbelievable. And to revisit that made me so angry with my younger self. But I understand why I was sort of like, yeah, whatever, because the time did not warrant for your anger. Yeah. The time didn't listen to your anger. The time didn't care about your damn anger.

25:27Kendall Werts:I'm glad that we're in a time now where you can feel that anger. I think that's sort of where I want to go now is like, have these things actually changed? Because Jess, in your essay, you write about how we had a body positivity era. We had that. But now we're back into a time when skinny is queen, when diet culture is replaced by JLP1s, when conservative politics are crowning hyperfemininity as the ideal. Are we just stuck in the same cycle with new labels or are we somewhere new?

25:53Jessica Grose:Well, I think in terms of like the extreme skinniness that we are now seeing again, I mean, every red carpet, I truly gasp. Like we see these actresses' bodies change who were already very thin and now they are even more thin. And I think that there's this sort of knee jerk, oh, don't talk about anybody's body. But it's you can't not talk about it. It is alarming to see. And I think that will be in vogue and that will change. I don't think that that level of extreme skinniness, which it calls to mind the, you know, heroin chic of the 90s, the plus minus of social media is that there are lots of other things.

26:32Jessica Grose:Right. So you see, you know, right now we're just after the Olympics and like Alyssa Liu and all the other women who just won Olympic medals. They have incredible bodies. They are so fit. They are doing amazing things with their bodies. And I do think that there are these sort of other role models for girls that feels better than when we were kids. You know, they're not just like cool to look at. Yeah. They're amazing. Yeah. So I think that there is promise for things to get better. I think we were in a particularly bad moment now. I think the advertising is only going to get worse. And that's sort of my broad conclusion.

27:09Jessica Grose:That's so spot on. The advertising won't even have people.

27:11Nadja Spiegelman:It'll have AI.

27:12Kendall Werts:Yeah. And kind of as someone who's like still working with like casting agents, gatekeepers as part of your job. Do you think that under Trump things are looking different or do you think this is a moment, a blip? Where do you think we're at in this cycle?

27:25Nadja Spiegelman:I love the Biden era. I love the DEI of it all, which was even more so than when Obama was president because of social media and like how even bigger it got, you know, under the Biden administration. So I think that after Biden exited stage right, then Trump came in and it totally changed the idea of what the system was, because people who are now talking and being free to say whatever they want are now on the wrong side of the historical facts of today. because today the rules changed and being outspoken and being somebody who has a value system and morals and standing on the business of what your morality is that's not in vogue that is not in fashion yeah what is in fashion is quiet luxury so shut up

28:20Kendall Werts:i'm hearing you say like i'm hearing you say someone who was really wanting to talk about their perspective, the specificity of their background and beliefs was really celebrated during the Biden administration.

28:30Nadja Spiegelman:It was celebrated during that time. And then this time, now we're celebrating a girl who has blue eyes and she loves her jeans that are also blue. I was going to say, yeah, what about how people look?

28:38Kendall Werts:Has that changed?

28:39Nadja Spiegelman:And the way that people look is now tokenism is back in full force. We just need one of you. So whoever's going to battle it out, like here's a piece of meat and you guys figure it out. So people are fighting over opportunities.

28:50Kendall Werts:Yeah. I want to go back because we have to sort of near the end, but I really just want to talk about Tyra. A lot of the discourse around this documentary has been about whether Tyra herself gets what reality TV calls the villain at it, whether she comes off as the villain or whether she acquits herself well. And what do you think? Is Tyra Banks the villain here?

29:09Jessica Grose:She's definitely the villain of this documentary. Like also, she dresses the part. She's in her inspector gadget, like trench coat. I was like, she looks ready to escape at any moment. She looks like she's going to run out. she is sort of exquisitely media trained. And I think we're in this moment where everyone wants people to be authentic. You know, it's a performance of authenticity. If you are sitting for a documentary, you are on a podcast, we are performing right now.

29:33Kendall Werts:I'm feeling really authentic.

29:37Nadja Spiegelman:Authenticity exists for a bit, but then something takes over. Right, but she comes off as inauthentic

29:43Jessica Grose:in that documentary because she's guarded and media trained. And not taking responsibility. And not taking responsibility. And I don't, you know what? I don't know if there was anything that she could have said that would have satisfied everyone. But even when given the opportunity to reflect on some of the things that happened, she's either defensive, she will occasionally apologize, but I think doesn't really show growth in terms of how she perceives a lot of the things that happened. I think a lot of it is just like, well, it was 2003 or whatever. And, you know, again, if that's how she feels, like, that's her truth.

30:20Jessica Grose:But I think a lot of people felt that that was not sufficient.

30:24Nadja Spiegelman:I thought that Tyra really did not understand that she was going to be the villain. I don't know who she thought she was in this situation. Because, yes, it starts off where she's like, look at all these things I did. But my biggest question to Tyra is, how did you land up in that Inspector Gadget outfit? Because the situation is pretty clear. These people have been doing this documentary for a time, and they called you to get a comment. here and there. And that's when you were like, you know what? Let me go and let me talk to them. Let me do some damage control. And she went up there and I think that she thought she was doing damage control.

31:01Nadja Spiegelman:And to just what you were saying is, did she with production, did she hear about these things? I'm not going to sit up here and say that she did not do anything. She revolutionized TV in a fashion television show, which there's not that many that are on that have been able to have the success that she has. Yeah. But in examining what's going on, you're in a lot of danger, girl.

31:22Kendall Werts:Yeah. She has this constant defense of just like, well, it was a different time. No one knew. How could I have known? It was a different time. That doesn't come off as, that doesn't really convince eventually. But she does have this one moment, or maybe it's a few moments throughout the documentary where she has this defense that is basically like, the audience wanted drama. And that to me is actually the most, convincing argument that she has is like, I'm not the villain. America's the villain. I'm just giving America what it wants. And I'm good at that. What do you guys make of that?

31:54Nadja Spiegelman:The thing is, is that Tyra walked around as if she was like the nicest person. And it's not that she just walked around that way. People put that on to her. She's a leader. She's a Black model, has done tremendous work in her career in the fashion business. So people, when she's wearing her cape people are putting the cape on her as strong and someone most importantly who is kind that sort of goes away in a way where we take off that cape of like oh my god look at how amazing she is and she turns into a modern day villain i think the analogy i have in my head hearing you

32:33Jessica Grose:talk it's like wall street guys never pretended like they were saving the world they're like i'm just making a lot of money and tech industry guys were like no i'm saving the world and we know that to be false now and we all hate them and it feels very much like tyra versus like worldwide wrestling right yeah worldwide wrestling never pretended like we're doing something for these wrestlers like we're doing putting good into the world it's entertainment right and i think why people are mad at tyra is exactly what you said it was like she wanted to be like no i'm doing i'm this beneficent person giving all this to the world and now it's like actually it's just entertainment and you can't really have it both ways yeah i think i think you're right it's the hypocrisy of it but i think she's right and i mean her her telling the audience that they're culpable made me feel like you're right i was i saw these girls being treated so ugly at the time and i enjoyed it and now with the hindsight of 20 years i don't think i would even re-watch the show

33:34Kendall Werts:Okay, thank you both so much for being here. This has been so fun. It's been such a pleasure to talk about this with you. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us.

34:08Kendall Werts:If you like this show, follow it on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishak Adarba, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek.

34:24Jessica Grose:Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, Efim Shapiro, and Amin Sahota.

34:36Kendall Werts:The fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. The head of operations is Shannon Busta. Audience support by Christina Samulewski. The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

34:57Thank you.