Bullying and Abuse!

THE KNIVES ARE OUT ...... and it’s not nice

The Sun-Herald, Melbourne, Australia has had some very controversial articles in recent days. One in particular dealt with the inappropriate and unacceptable statements made by the judges in the "Australia's Next Top Model" contest.

One judge has been forced to apologise for his caustic and scathing comments about some of the contestants. Judges are supposedly chosen as they represent the top of their field and experts in fashion and modelling. But these judges, and sadly they included two women, were hypocritical and discriminatory. Let's face it, plus sizers have been fighting this type of "bad" behaviour by people in the press and the fashion industry - now they're turning their attention and anger towards the young and hopeful models of the future. Quite apart from the girls who are receiving a lot of flak due to their being "too skinny" (one lass has a BMI of 15.1 and weighs 49 kg), these other girls are what we would loosely term "typical" and "average' if not "normal". But judges such as these on the show are our (women's) worst enemies and appear to think they are a law unto themselves. They take their arrogance and criticisms far beyond the bounds of decency.

Here are a view of the comments made about the model contestants:

(1) ‘‘I'm loving her. Slightly psycho, slightly beauty pageant-looking. OK, she's like a murderous beauty-pageant queen.''

(2) ‘‘Eyes slightly too close together and could knife you in the back - she's good.''

(3) ‘‘She's got no top lip. She's got a blockhead.''

(4) ‘‘She's the one you said looked like Frankenstein.''

(5) ‘‘She looks like a wild pig. What a lump - a moose.''

(6) ‘‘You may be a bogan, but don't be a bogan on this show.''

Comments of encouragement are occasionally directed at the contestants, but Melbourne psychologist Dr Janet Hall worries about the impact of put-downs. Hall believes the experience of being dismissed and immediately sent home from a reality show has the potential to leave contestants feeling ‘‘depressed, used and invalidated''.

‘‘They are making hostile judgments based on superficial visuals,'' Hall says of some of the judges' comments.

‘‘I spend my life as a psychologist trying to build people's self-esteem after they have been criticised about their looks by their peers and even their parents - fathers in particular.''

As I said, it’s not nice. We’ve had a overwhelming dose of this type of discrimination based on our plus size, and now younger women are being bullied in the same way. And there's supposed to be a law against discrimination relating to size - surely that means ALL sizes?