Tyra Banks went on Good Morning America today to say more nice things about Vogue’s new anti-eating-disorders initiative and tell more stories about people who said she was too fat to model. She made pretty much all the same points that were in her “Open Letter to Models” on the Daily Beast yesterday, with a few additions. Here’s one:
When little boys go to a basketball game with their dad, and they’re watching Lebron James or Carmelo Anthony or Dwyane Wade, and they’re like, ‘Ooh, woah, he slammed it!’ And then they go home, and that little boy is not crying himself to sleep because he doesn’t look like Lebron or can’t slam the ball like Lebron. He doesn’t have the pressure to be that guy, or to be his hero. But when a girl is looking at a magazine with her mother, there are all these subliminal images saying that if you’re not a size zero of if you don’t look like this, then you’re not good enough.
We’d argue that little boys actually do feel pressure to look like athletes and be good at sports — and advertisers feed into those male insecurities big-time — but it’s okay, we know Tyra means well! Perhaps more important, she finds a way to squeeze in her new favorite word, flawsome, which she’s trying really hard to make into a “thing” now. You can watch the video here.
