Victoria’s Secret model Cameron Russell delivered an (ostensibly) self-effacing perspective on her profession at a Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference last October. TED posted her talk on its website last month. But, for some inexplicable reason, the mainstream media began reporting on it as breaking news last week.
Here, in part, is what she said:
Hard work is not why I have been successful as a model… The most important part of my job is to show up with a 23-inch waist, looking young, feminine, and white. This shouldn’t really shock anyone … beauty and race and privilege get you a news story.
(TEDxMidAtlantic, October 2012)
She is right, of course: not only about the genetic lottery that enables her to have a very lucrative career as a model, but also about the superficial values that prizes beauty over brains. Indeed, apropos of the latter, despite the appearance of other notable speakers like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the only reason most people will know anything about this conference is that model Cameron was there.
But it’s plainly absurd for the media to be turning her into the Harriet Beecher Stowe of modeling. Not least because it smacks of brazen hypocrisy for Cameron to be condemning the genetics and racism upon which the beauty industry is built while at the same time “cashing out” on them – as she informs her audience, with no hint of irony, is exactly what she’s doing.
According to yesterday’s edition of the Daily Mail, she wanted to warn young girls that, even though “it’s awesome,” modeling is “not a career path.” Except that this is rather like Babe Ruth warning young Blacks (like Jackie Robinson) that, even though playing Baseball is an awesome career for Whites, racism precludes it ever being so for Blacks.
And given the regular feature in People magazine on celebrities, including supermodels, “caught” without makeup, who needs Cameron to inform them that no model looks in real life the way she looks in glossy magazines?
To be fair, she said on CNN yesterday that she wanted to “tell an honest personal narrative of what privilege means.” Except that only Prince William lamenting the privileges of royalty could be more self-indulgent … and redundant.
Meanwhile, Cameron seems very keen to let people know that she has a degree in economics and political science from Columbia University. But this only makes one wonder why a woman with her brains and preening social rectitude would settle for a profession that perpetuates the very superficial and racist notions of beauty she condemns.
Frankly, the only thing shocking about skinny White bitches dominating the beauty industry is this skinny White bitch trying to have her cake and eat it too – by criticizing what she continues to benefit from so handsomely….
In any event, she’s hardly the first person to decry the self-loathing inherent in celebrating tall, skinny, White women as the icons of beauty in a nation where short, fat, multiracial women are the norm. In fact, here’s what I was constrained to note six years ago in what I described as “my biannual rant against skinny models” strutting their dry bones during fashion week:
I’m not too focused on how bone thin these bitches are to notice how bone white they are also!
(“Fashion Model Fired for Being too Skinny? Hallelujah!” The iPINIONS Journal, September 12, 2007)
But thanks for chiming in, Cameron. I hope your conscience is allowing you to get more beauty sleep now.
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Fashion model … too skinny