Everyone's talking about Netflix's new mini-docuseries that pulls back the curtain on Tyra Banks' hugely problematic empire.

The whole thing hinges on one premise: this was filmed in a darker time. Things are different now!!! We've learned, we've grown, the fashion industry has changed, we promise!!!

I call cap.

Don’t agree with me? I urge you to look around. Take a wee scroll through TikTok. Simply open Instagram. And tell me with a straight face that you genuinely believe body standards have gotten healthier, the pressure to be thin has eased, or that young women aren't drowning in diet culture and disordered eating content disguised as wellness.

I hate to break it to you, darling, but it hasn't gotten better. It's just better at hiding what it is.

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In the ANTM era, the toxicity was overt.

Tyra telling contestants to lose weight on camera, shaving off an entire lifetime of growing their precious hair, only to eliminate them the next day, making them pose in literal garbage, or with like poisonous snakes or whatever. Full days with no food, in the heat, models passing out.

The cruelty was the point, and it was right there on screen.

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Now? The toxicity is covert.

It's wellness influencers selling "what I eat in a day" content that's clearly just disordered eating. Or fitness accounts promoting routines that are unsustainable and unhealthy. It's the massive fkn influx of diet culture rebranded as self-care and clean living.

The messaging has gotten softer, but the impact may have gotten worse. Regardless, the outcome is the same: being brought to the brink of tears in the mirror, a screaming voice in your head at the beach that refuses to let you feel comfortable even for a second, days of 900 calories because you feel "a little puffy today."

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The scale being the most used item in your house, aside from the tape measure. This is what it’s given us.

Somehow the whole thing gets more insidious than Ed and Lorraine Warren could even imagine.

Influencers are using Ozempic, Wegovy, and other GLP-1 drugs to lose massive amounts of weight, or even getting BBLs and surgeries, only to turn around and sell you some sh*tty f*cking guide that promises if you just follow their exact routine, you can look like them too.

Except you can't. Because they didn't get there through the workout plan they're selling. They got there through medical intervention they're not disclosing.

It's the perfect scam. You buy the program, follow it religiously, only you don't get the results. And you blame yourself - your lack of discipline, your genetics, your failure - instead of realising you were sold a lie from the start. And you buy the lie again.

This is ANTM-level manipulation, just with better PR and a Shopify link.

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We now have an entire generation of young women who've grown up marinating in this content.

Their feeds are wall-to-wall body checks, transformation photos, "get ready with me" videos from people with bodies that are either genetically rare or medically achieved.

The result is mass hysteria and insecurity.

Body dysmorphia rates are climbing. Disordered eating is as normalised, if not more so, than the 90’s. And the pressure to look a certain way hasn't eased—it's intensified. Because now it's not just in magazines or on one TV show.

It's everywhere, all the time, algorithmically optimised to make you feel inadequate af.

At least with ANTM, you could turn off the TV. With social media, the pressure is constant and inescapable.

How do I know this? Because I sit right in this cohort, with all the stretch marks to show for it.

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Sounding a little familiar?

The Netflix documentary wants you to believe ANTM was a product of its time. A relic of when we didn't know better. But we did know better. We just didn't care.

Unfortunately, I still don’t think we do.

The system evolved, while the cruelty and exploitation got sneakier. Which meant the damage got deeper.

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Tyra told girls (tiny girls, malnourished girls, models) to their faces they needed to lose weight. Now influencers sell us the tools to develop eating disorders while calling it empowerment.

I genuinely can’t tell which is worse.

The modelling industry, the influencer economy and the wellness-industrial complex - have all learned to package the same toxicity in more palatable language.

Body positivity became body neutrality became wellness culture became whatever euphemism we're using now to avoid saying what it actually is: the systematic monetisation of women's insecurity.

So when Netflix asks you to reflect on how far we've come, maybe instead ask whether we've come anywhere at all?

Because from where I'm standing, scrolling through an endless feed of impossible bodies and false promises, to the point where I question my reflection daily, it looks an awful lot like we're still in the ANTM house.

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