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penfield"The world more often rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself."
- La Rochefocauld
This past Saturday at the shopping mall near my apartment, there was an open call audition for prospective contestants on the CW program America's Next Top Model*. You know which reality show I mean -- the one where blatantly self-deluded individuals attempt to compensate for a staggering lack of self-esteem by humiliating themselves before millions of viewers through a series of artificial tasks and trivial objectives, interlaced with overtly melodramatic music and vapid "analysis" by pseudo-famous has-beens and who-are-theys.
*The official Web site for this program lists "Whitney" as America's Next Top Model, which begs the question, who is America's Current Top Model? It would seem that America's Current Top Model is the person we should be interested in. And what is the method of succession? Once a new Next Top Model is crowned (named? knighted? constructed?), does the previous Next Top Model become the Current Top Model or does she become the "Former Next Top Model" or the "Last Top Model," or does she simply go back to her job at Hooters?
Initially I considered going to the mall to watch this Amazonian parade, where the standard, garishly constructed floats are presented in the form of real-life women, immaculately plastered with foundation and poured into form-fitting casualwear. But I had neither the energy nor the patience to hang around the food court of Pentagon City's Fashion Centre, which even on normal weekdays is so infested with misdirected and disaffected youth that they should seriously consider instituting a drop-in vasectomy clinic.
And it's a good thing, because on a simple walk through the mall on the way to the train station, I bore fleeting witness to the scene and immediately felt a strange kind of nausea; the feeling actually started in my eyes and passed through my heart, zipped right through my stomach and temporarily shut down my genitals. The line must have been 400 women long, stretching from one end of the mall to the other, snaking around and through the various cell phone kiosks with which they could so easily have called for help.
It could be that I'm making too much of it, or being too judgmental, or psychoanalyzing from the cheap seats. But it made me deeply sad that so many women, who presumably have something, anything to offer besides a pouty expression, were standing in this line for hours, teetering precariously in what I presume to be extremely uncomfortable footwear, waiting for the opportunity to be summarily poked, prodded and otherwise objectified just to qualify for the opportunity to be further poked, prodded and objectified for -- if they're lucky -- another 16 weeks. On television.
I think it's nice that some of these women were able to pursue their dream, and hopefully one of those women will be able to seize it and live it out. I admire these girls for putting themselves through a social, psychological and physical obstacle course in the service of their dream. Thinking of it that way, it's actually sort of inspiring. But still: if it were me, I would have dreamed a more comfortable dream.
- La Rochefocauld
This past Saturday at the shopping mall near my apartment, there was an open call audition for prospective contestants on the CW program America's Next Top Model*. You know which reality show I mean -- the one where blatantly self-deluded individuals attempt to compensate for a staggering lack of self-esteem by humiliating themselves before millions of viewers through a series of artificial tasks and trivial objectives, interlaced with overtly melodramatic music and vapid "analysis" by pseudo-famous has-beens and who-are-theys.
*The official Web site for this program lists "Whitney" as America's Next Top Model, which begs the question, who is America's Current Top Model? It would seem that America's Current Top Model is the person we should be interested in. And what is the method of succession? Once a new Next Top Model is crowned (named? knighted? constructed?), does the previous Next Top Model become the Current Top Model or does she become the "Former Next Top Model" or the "Last Top Model," or does she simply go back to her job at Hooters?
Initially I considered going to the mall to watch this Amazonian parade, where the standard, garishly constructed floats are presented in the form of real-life women, immaculately plastered with foundation and poured into form-fitting casualwear. But I had neither the energy nor the patience to hang around the food court of Pentagon City's Fashion Centre, which even on normal weekdays is so infested with misdirected and disaffected youth that they should seriously consider instituting a drop-in vasectomy clinic.
And it's a good thing, because on a simple walk through the mall on the way to the train station, I bore fleeting witness to the scene and immediately felt a strange kind of nausea; the feeling actually started in my eyes and passed through my heart, zipped right through my stomach and temporarily shut down my genitals. The line must have been 400 women long, stretching from one end of the mall to the other, snaking around and through the various cell phone kiosks with which they could so easily have called for help.
It could be that I'm making too much of it, or being too judgmental, or psychoanalyzing from the cheap seats. But it made me deeply sad that so many women, who presumably have something, anything to offer besides a pouty expression, were standing in this line for hours, teetering precariously in what I presume to be extremely uncomfortable footwear, waiting for the opportunity to be summarily poked, prodded and otherwise objectified just to qualify for the opportunity to be further poked, prodded and objectified for -- if they're lucky -- another 16 weeks. On television.
I think it's nice that some of these women were able to pursue their dream, and hopefully one of those women will be able to seize it and live it out. I admire these girls for putting themselves through a social, psychological and physical obstacle course in the service of their dream. Thinking of it that way, it's actually sort of inspiring. But still: if it were me, I would have dreamed a more comfortable dream.
