We Were 16 and Watching: The Damage of America’s Next Top Model

Imagine creating a show to dismantle the modelling industry to challenge its failures in body positivity, beauty standards and racial discrimination, only to birth a show that amplified and ordained those very things even more.

I watched America’s Next Top Model religiously at 16. From 2003 onwards I was gripped, season after season. I never saw the undertones. I didn’t hear what was being said beneath the spectacle. Watching it back now, those undertones aren’t subtle, they’re loud, aggressive, impossible to ignore.

The micro-aggressions weren’t micro at all. They were macro. The disregard for young women’s mental and physical health wasn’t hidden, it was completely overlooked in plain sight.

Reality TV is, quite frankly, the Hunger Games. Human beings positioned as pawns for the simple pleasures of us, the viewers, and the pursuit of “good TV.” But now, watching with adult eyes, lived eyes, it’s clear: it wasn’t okay. It’s not okay.

In an attempt to present a “new” definition of beauty and health, the show normalised medical procedures to enhance appearance, as though the natural beauty that got these girls onto the show was somehow insufficient. They modelled with unhoused people as props. They staged shoots where contestants acted out brutal murders. They race-swapped. The list goes on.

And the contradiction was constant. Why select “plus-size” models only to repeatedly make them feel too big to model? What exactly was being proven? What message was being sent?

I can’t help but wonder whether being glued to America’s Next Top Model at 16 subconsciously conditioned me. Conditioned me to fixate on my body. To feel proud of my concaved stomach. To obsess over my gapped tooth and then to hate it. To let something so trivial quietly destroy parts of me I never fully acknowledged at the time.

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough, the slow seep of messaging. The way it embeds itself. The way it shapes how you see yourself long before you have the language to question it.

What unsettled me most about the recent documentary, as honest and reflective as parts of it were, was the repeated line: “We just didn’t know… but now we do.”

No. You should have known.

Production knew. You knew. You just wanted ratings and you got them. And then you continued. The apologies felt rehearsed, the accountability wrapped in excuses. It was painful to watch.

“It certainly wasn’t my place,” Jay Manuel said when asked if he ever spoke to Tyra and Ken about some of the more disturbing shoot concepts.

If it wasn’t your place to at least voice concern, then whose was it?

Silence is not neutrality. Silence is participation.

It’s easy, years later, to reframe it as ignorance, to blame the era, the culture, the time. But even then, these were young women. Many barely adults. Removed from their support systems. Competing under pressure. Being critiqued, reshaped and repackaged for entertainment.

And we watched.

I watched.

That’s the uncomfortable truth.

There’s something sobering about revisiting the media that shaped you. About realising that what you once consumed as aspiration was, in many ways, exploitation. It doesn’t erase the nostalgia. It doesn’t deny the impact the show had on the industry or on culture. But it does demand honesty.

If we’re going to call something groundbreaking, we also have to call out the ground it broke people on.

Maybe that’s the real reckoning, not cancelling the past, but confronting it fully. Acknowledging the harm without dressing it up. And choosing, going forward, to do better.

Because “we didn’t know” has never been a good enough excuse!