During the fourth cycle of the long-running reality show “America’s Next Top Model,” one contestant, Keenyah Hill, had multiple episodes devoted to her weight gain. In one, the models were depicted as the seven deadly sins and Hill was given “gluttony,” lying in food scraps, posing with a half-eaten doughnut. Another photo shoot had the contestants made up like different African animals, and the producers made Hill into an elephant. During the judging panels, various judges called her “piggy” and “fat,” and the show’s creator and executive producer, the model Tyra Banks, gave Hill a hard time about having to retouch her midriff.
I watched this cycle (“season” in the parlance of the show) when it aired in 2005. I hadn’t remembered this specific plotline about Hill’s weight until I watched “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model,” a three-part documentary that recently premiered on Netflix. But I’m pretty sure if you had asked 23-year-old me what I thought about the way Hill was treated, I would have said some version of: Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown. These girls signed up for a modeling competition. What did they expect?
That seems to be Banks’s attitude today, as she looks back at “Top Model.” In the documentary, she vacillates between patting herself on the back for opening doors for women who aren’t white or rail thin and justifying the way models like Hill, who is Black, were treated. (“Back then, the fashion industry’s beauty standards were so narrow. That’s the world that we lived in,” Banks said of the fat-shaming that Hill and other contestants endured.)
Though she was a creator and executive producer of “America’s Next Top Model,” which aired from 2003 to 2018, Banks deflects responsibility for much of what happened on her show (her co-creator Ken Mok, who is also in the documentary, takes even less accountability, but he was not the face of the show). Early seasons were particularly nasty. The models had weigh-ins, and a contestant who was already medically underweight was bullied into losing even more. Eating disorders were barely hidden. One model seemed to eat pickles as a meal; another fainted on set because she was starving herself.
The show demanded other body modifications as well. Another model, Dani Evans, did not want to close a gap in her teeth. Banks coerced her into dental surgery, claiming she wouldn’t get work if she kept the gap. Then, in a later season, she encouraged a different model to widen the gap in her teeth. Though Banks says she apologized to Evans, Evans said in the documentary, “Me getting my gap closed is not opening any doors for me. You knew what you were doing for the show. You were making ‘good for TV’ at my expense.”
Now that my frontal lobe is fully developed, I can see how unnecessarily humiliating the show was toward its uniformly beautiful castmates, and how ugly it was for me to be enjoying their torment. Yes, they were technically adults and they signed up for this, but a lot of them were still teenagers, and often unsophisticated. “We’re all too young to verbalize: ‘I’m scared,’” one of the models said. Many of them were also from poor backgrounds; this show may have been their only shot at getting out of their situations. The models interviewed for the documentary are both grateful for the opportunity and angry to have been treated so shabbily. (The documentary also includes a model who was sexually assaulted on camera, and is still hurting. It’s awful.)
The 2000s were a time when thinness reigned, and now we’re in another. Though I maintain that the exceedingly slender beauty ideal never went away, a combination of Ozempic and other effective weight loss medications, conservative politics that emphasize restrictive ideas of femininity, and the maturation of algorithmic social media have made the super-skinny ideal nearly inescapable. As The Times’s chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, wrote last year, after a short period where there was at least some plus-size and midsize representation on the runway, “the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end,” and it’s not coming back any time soon.
Why does your 2026 social media feed feel like it could have been programmed by a pro-ana blogger of the early “Top Model” era? When social media became widespread, around 2010, many social networks had chronological feeds, so you would see just the posts from the people you followed in order from newest to oldest. Users had more control over what they saw, and could to some extent curate their feeds to better reflect their own tastes. This was also a period when there was a brief glimmer of cultural support for bodies that were not very thin and white, when it was in vogue to critique the systems — like the fashion industry — that enforced such a narrow and often unhealthy beauty ideal.
Around 2016, many platforms had switched to an algorithmic feed, where users had less control over what they were shown, and their preferences were determined, in part, by what was already popular. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the end of any hope for a more body-diverse future. The dominance of the very thin ideal is reinforced when it is all you see. And now more than two decades into this, I’m left wondering how we’ll ever get back to something healthier.
We know from leaked documents and whistle-blowers that the algorithms prioritized conventional beauty and could send young female users down a rabbit hole of negative comparison. Social media companies deliberately targeted young women with beauty advertisements when they were feeling anxious and worried about their bodies. If you can never be thin enough, you’ll keep engaging.
One small study examining the algorithms of TikTok users with eating disorders versus a control group found that the users with eating disorders had algorithms that “delivered 335 percent more dieting videos” and “142 percent more exercise videos.” Meta and Google (YouTube) are now defending themselves in a series of lawsuits because they refuse to take any real accountability for the psychological harm they may be continuing to cause their users.
This brings me back to the creators of “America’s Next Top Model.” They deserve some of our understanding, because the show is over 20 years old, yet even by early aughts standards, the way they treated some of those girls was cruel. “I think there’s just some level of responsibility to the viewer knowing that there are so many young women watching this show,” Keenyah Hill said, about the way the judges spoke about her body. “There’s an insensitivity toward what it would do for their self-confidence.”
The problem then and now is that nobody really wants to be responsible when they can make millions, or even billions, off the insecurity of teenage girls. So it’s left to us, as individuals, to click away.
End Notes
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I picked up Aisha Muharrar’s debut novel, “Loved One,” to read while I hunkered down in this blizzard. It’s such a cozy, bittersweet story about a jewelry designer named Julia who loses her longtime friend and first love, Gabe, suddenly. Julia has just turned 30, and she is trying to figure out what her fully adult life looks like while she confronts Gabe’s death and his meaning to her. It goes down smooth, and it has a lot of summer scenes that I’m enjoying as I listen to the dulcet sounds of thunder snow.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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