Now sack Gok Wan and Brand ,Channel 4! (Miss Naked Beauty)

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Miss Naked Beauty
Date:	31/10/08 (273 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap titilation

Disadvantages: Humiliating and exploitative to women

I'm baffled at this programs popularity with women. I haven't seen anything as exploitative and hypocritical towards the female species since Alf Garnett put his feet up! The irritating Gok Wong should be ashamed of himself for being involved in this. In fact once Channel Four have fired the world's un-funniest comedian in Russell Brand they should fire Gok, too! I'm just stunned those women's groups haven't kicked up about this like they bored and grumpy pensioners have over Ross and Brand.

The idea of the show (so they say) is to find a 'female ambassador' for women to go around the country to promote normal women and natural beauty. Fair enough. I'm sure there are thousand of complaints women will hope she would pass on to the fashion and beauty industry on their behalf. But the big problem with this show is it's a huge contradiction, telling women they shouldn't aspire to be the thin and sexy women in the magazines, yet cast and produced by those very people that push that unattainable image. The exotic Co-host Mylene Klass is hardly the average woman. She's very beautiful and pretty much perfect to men and what's every woman aspires to be and drawing that contrast over the more plane contestants here just feels divisive and deliberate.

The opening show saw the women picked from over 10,000 entrants hosed down in a grubby and empty swimming pool to rid them of their make-up and hair do`s so to get down to that natural beauty, yet Gok had more make-up on than Barbara Cartland, Myleene definitely dipping into his cosmetics bag in the commercial break. Goks career is a professional stylist to make women wear the right clothes and make-up. What was the message here? Why weren't the hosts told to jump in the pool to prove with them their point? The tabloids picked up on the pool stunt and compared it to the humiliation of the new arrivals to Auschwitz. Clearly no comparison but it did look bad.

After the opening episode of six show run this has quickly become an Apprentice style format, the girls put into two teams to battle it out with each other to win the big prize, a mechanism to produce girly bitching of course, which is always great TV. What the girls weren't told when they applied for the show was that it would be this type of format, an exercise in humiliation and self esteem crushing. The girls did apply were told that it would be a straight forward reality show/beauty pageant....pretty girls getting on telly scenario. If they had asked for more normal women to apply then I suspect this show wouldn't have been made as we just don't want to subconsciously see normal and plain people that would have applied for that job on telly.

We aspire to be attractive and slim and so I suppose that's why they wanted that vainer demographic to apply, presumably picked from their photos. And to be fair if you do apply for reality game shows then you deserve all you get. But the message here is all rather contradictory and the show clearly anything but what it says on the tin, the key to that humiliation process.

Once the final fifty were hosed down in that pool they soon realized it wasn't that easy beauty pageant they had hoped for, many in tears, eye-liner running down their faces like sewage coming out of a waste pipe. They were given 15 seconds to decide whether they wanted to jump in the pool and if they didn't then they clearly wouldn't be on telly and the show. Yes it's washing away people's vanity and ego type metaphor but it's also exploitative of the women in the pool in their bra and pants. I just cringed at that scene. But worse was to follow, some of the girls 'illuminated' after that hosing and humiliation, the judging panel deciding they didn't have enough 'natural beauty' to go on. Owww. This happens every week. The hypocrisy of that panel is its Mica Paris, never seen in public without hair extensions and heavy 'slap', and James Brown, the king of 'lad mag' publishing, ironically making his money from 'selling' girls that are the exact opposite he's judging. The third panel member is a woman with more crow's feet than a snowy country field in a Scottish winter, her normal job to make those very women she's judging feel inadequate and so buy into the fashions industry to keep selling the impossible dream.

The second episode saw the girls split into two teams, their job to design a mannequin that represented normal women and then try and persuade two high street stores (including Myleenes M&S) to put it in their window. A size 14 dummy was created and it was clear the stores representatives were pensive to say the least to have to go along with it. This was everything they didn't do in the fashion industry. But in the Harrods window it went. In keeping with these shows the losing team had to lose two girls via the judges - and low and behold they voted off the oldest one and the shortest one (with X Factor sentimental music playing), completely destroying the point of the show yet again. The excuse for them to go was they were 'too noisy' and 'too quiet', respectively, and if this approach continues it will mean we will be left with the youngest with the best figures, the ones left that look like the very models the show is supposed to be against. In fact the producers have picked contestants based on that elimination process, all manner of sizes and hang-ups. Why else pick someone 4ft, 10! Again, the whole idea of voting girls off the show is cruel and hypocritical. Isn't this rejection women get based on looks, age, and size the whole point of wearing cosmetics and fashions? BBC 2 excellent reality show called 'The Restaurant' also deployed the same vacuous selection process this week, the two youngest and most attractive people winning the competition.

The point of this show seems to be to further strip women of their dignity so to make them even more reliant on health and beauty products that were cruelly and deliberately advertised during the shows commercial breaks. Like I said I'm just amazed it hasn't been attacked more. No wonder women get 18% less wages than men if they aspire to these programs and outcomes. A TV production company is laughing at you through yet another vulgar camp gay presenter that "knows women", and yet you buy into this bull and believe it?

The reason why models are thin and svelte is because that's what women aspire to be and the whole idea of taking that aspiration away and replacing the models with normal girls would kill the fashion trade stone dead, even though that when the women on the show surveyed women in the streets they said that regular size is exactly want they want to see...more of that representation in the industry of 'normal women'. But girls, the reason the fashion and beauty industry is so huge is because women want to be glamorous. Seeing a fat mannequin in a shop window would put normal women off going into a store if you ask me. Correct me if I'm wrong. You are a strange lot and this is evidence of.

Conclusion...

In times of recession lipstick sales go up as women use their looks and bodies more to keep a roof over their heads (now is a great time to date guys!) and so the cosmetics industry becomes even more important to them. Men just carry on slogging away to pay for all this vanity of course.
Now I like natural women and their bodies (girls are so sexy without make-up) and guys know all too well that the female species biggest worries in the world are not the bills and boyfriends but what they look like when they get up in the morning with all those imperfections. Having a big bum is far worse than a big mortgage. I try to kiss all their wrinkles and bumps away when they let me but it's not always successful. Women are delicate and they don't need TV like this.

After a hard days work I'm pretty sure the intelligent dooyoo girls who watched this picked up on how bad this show was and agree with me it was out of order and a contradiction. But it's the girls that don't see that who are the ones that are most likely to believe in this air-head/brushed fantasy world and get messed up by it. You don't get slimming diseases, M.E and food alleges in Africa. Gok Wan (a beauty counter make-up artist for Debenhams in Leicester in his early days...) knows this show is really about subtly giving off the message that you DO need beauty products because he wants to show us how plain women can be without them here. It would not surprise me if he's bringing out similar products for Christmas to help those girls 'look good', and I'm sure Myleene Klass also has a perfume launch or two lined up for Santa. And you thought Ross and Brand dumbed down TV! I'm just fed up with the way Middle-class TV types exploit less sophisticated people through these reality shows. I maybe way off the mark and missed the point here but I wont be watching this again, even though you do get to see bare titties before 9PM.

Summary: Reaility TV indeed.