'Britain's Missing Top Model': A Tricky Business, But Not A Different One

Tonight, BBC America airs the second episode of Britain's Missing Top Model, yet another "Top Model" offshoot — this time, featuring eight (well, now it's seven) contestants with disabilities. (Don't Google it if you don't want to be spoiled; it aired in full in the UK quite a while ago.)

It sounds like a potentially bizarre idea (not the idea of a disabled model, but the idea of a show with a competition among them as its theme), but an interesting review of the show in The New York Times helps explain, even while it expresses grave reservations, why the first episode didn't set off as many red flags as I expected it might.

While the review voices the feeling that there's something weird and exploitative about the show, it bottom-lines the actual product pretty well: these girls are functioning exactly like the girls on every other Top Model iteration.

Models and role models, and the right to be small and petty, after the jump.

 

Consider the comments about turning the contestants into "role models." This is not in any way specific to this edition. Tyra Banks, on America's Next Top Model, always (preposterously) suggests that she's casting a role model: a role model for plus-size girls, a role model for autistic girls, a role model for girls who have been abused, a role model for girls who have been poor — that is part of the package every time, schlocky as that package may be.

You don't have to have a disability, in other words, to find yourself turned into a supposed role model just because you're in a modeling competition. It's dumb, don't get me wrong, but it's not specific to this new show. The confusing of models and role models goes far, far beyond Britain's Missing Top Model.

Or consider this comment: "This series comes with a paradoxical premise: it's a contest designed to raise the profile and confidence of disabled women but makes a spectacle of their hunger for acceptance."

Take out the word "disabled," and read that again: Welcome to America's Next Top Model, Australia's Next Top Model, and ... yeah, pretty much any show about models. They don't package these things as exercises in having your self-esteem mercilessly beaten down, as a modeling career might actually be. It is always this supposed "paradox" — a show about learning to be confident and love yourself while also being told that you can't tilt your head in this or that direction because you have a weird nose.

Or this: Britain's Missing Top Model features a deaf contestant, and there has been some sniping about how perhaps that shouldn't count, because being deaf isn't a disability that shows in a picture. Of course, the deaf model could argue that a missing arm that's not shown in a picture becomes completely irrelevant, while she is always deaf — and thus always unable to directly communicate with photographers, no matter what part of her is being photographed. Both models have a reasonable argument — but it's one that wouldn't be made by anyone but a petty, one-upping reality-show model, which makes them just like every other petty, one-upping reality-show model, and that's great.

It's not that it's some kind of inspiring victory that these women have now been given the same chance to act like an entitled loon on television that every other aspiring Top Model has. But if these girls weren't sniping about each other — she doesn't deserve it, she doesn't need it like I do, she hasn't been through as much as I have, I have more built-in disadvantages than she does — wouldn't it be horribly patronizing? Because that's what usually happens.

In fact, the final judging of the first episode came down to precisely the issue of the "invisible" disability versus the visible one. The judges got into an entirely fair discussion about whether the idea was simply to remove disability as a barrier to modeling for these particular girls, in which case a deaf model would be a perfectly appropriate outcome, or whether the idea was to confront the public with an image of a disabled model in order to change people's perspectives, in which case it doesn't make sense for it to be someone whose disability doesn't show up in a picture. It's not The Wire, but it was an interesting debate.

The fact is, if you're going to put on what amounts to Britain's Next Top Model With A Disability, you don't suddenly make it into Britain's Bunch Of Friendly, Supportive Girls Who Are In It To Inspire Others. These girls have just as much right to want attention, to be obsessed with their appearances, and to be sort of frothy and into themselves, as anyone else does.

Whatever your particular story is, these shows make a tale out of it — a tale about you nobly fighting to overcome your challenges. America's Next Top Model has had a girl with Asperger's Syndrome, a girl whose legs had been severely burned, and a transgender model. They weren't any nicer or meaner than anyone else, for the most part.

The same thing's going on here. Is it art? Hardly. But does a girl with a deformed hip have just as much right to decide to take part in it as anybody else?

Sounds fair to me.