Ashley Arbaugh, film still from “Girl Model,” Nadya Vall, above.

The documentary follows a former model and current modeling scout, Ashley Arbaugh, as she promises success and money to poor teen girls from small-town Siberia. Filmmakers, David Rodon and Ashley Sabin contrast Arbaugh’s own story of being a miserable young model in Tokyo with the work she currently does, recruiting girls to embark on a similar (if not much less lucrative) journey.

After surveying a room full of young Siberian girls in bikinis, Arbaugh picks several to travel to Tokyo, a place hungry for “fresh faces.” She works with Tigran Khachatrian, a man who thinks the best way to keep young models in line is to take them on a trip to the morgue to see an autopsy. Arbaugh is beholden to Khachatrian, but seems uncomfortable as he tells the filmmakers that his work now is devoting his life to saving young girls as some sort of penance for killing many men at war. By now it is clear this business is at least on the outskirts of unsavory.

However, perhaps the strangest aspect of this film is that Arbaugh (who may appear most culpable due to her own experience as a young model), was the one who approached the filmmakers suggesting a documentary about the industry.

I have scoured the Internet for recent interviews with Arbaugh but none can be found, leading me to assume that she caught a lot of flack for participating in the film, likely from those in her industry and from critics on the outside, who may have felt she should not be in business profiting from the exploitation (or near exploitation) of young girls.

However, without Arbaugh’s access, the film would never have been made. She knowingly implicates herself which is not an easy thing to do, and for that I applaud her. She admits to hating the business but being “addicted” to the lifestyle it provides, though she lives a self-described vapid life. In her bathroom she has photos she takes secretly of models under tables, a mess of legs and torsos and feet, hands clasped, body parts that may or may not fit together. As she puts them together trying to make sense of the unidentifiable bodies before her, she appears somewhat unstable. At another point in the film, she says that she has had to forgo her own sense of aesthetics to provide what the market wants, but she’s spent so long searching for the “right” girls for the market that she has come to agree that the most beautiful and ideal form is that of a very young skinny doe-eyed girl.

Like the girls separated from their families in Siberia, it seems Arbaugh’s perspective was taken and twisted by modeling as well. She has two naked baby dolls, bought when she purchased her Connecticut home at 23. She explains that since she had a house, she decided she should also have a family, the logic of a girl at play.

One of the girls Arbaugh scouts, Nadya Vall, seems miserable as Arbaugh was in Tokyo many years ago. Eventually she goes home in debt and it looks like she will never participate in the modeling business again, yet like Arbaugh, she continues to model.

Who is responsible for her exploitation then? What made her return?

The system Arbaugh is participating in is not right or nice or fair, and Arbaugh seems aware that the role she plays is at times reprehensible. If there were anything more Arbaugh could do to change the system from within than suggest and allow this documentary, I am not sure what that might be. However, the problem is bigger than Arbaugh, as older model Rachel Blais points out in the film. Society hungers for youth and beauty, and fashion is at once in command and surrendering to prevailing taste.

As for the models, how can one blame them? Once you have seen a world of beauty and fantasy and learned that your body may be your only way in, can you really look for other options?

Stream entire documentary on PBS through April 23

Watch Girl Model on PBS. See more from POV.

Wait, what? It’s not everyone’s favorite show?!

A bit of Internet research revealed that people LOVE to hate Lena Dunham, the show’s creator and star. People call her fat and ugly, and either use this as a reason to attack the show or to love it, as if being average looking was some new political statement.

Being average and famous is nothing new, check out the entire cast of Jersey Shore or any other reality TV show. What makes Dunham so polarizing is that she dared to rise up from the ranks of averageness powered only by her own chutzpah (and Judd Apatow), and now that she is in the limelight, she continues to remain a slob-story.

Other women rise from the ranks of averageness, but when they “arrive” most make sure to adhere to a typical brand of femininty. As a reward, these women, instead of (or at least in addition to) being called fat and ugly, get referred to as the “girl next door“– think of the rise of the perfectly average and extremely manufactured Britney Spears.

This may all be old news, but what isn’t old news is how much Lena Dunham actually looks like Britney Spears

Exhibit A:

Lena Dunham

Britney Spears

Twinsies?

Lena Dunham

Britney Spears making sexy face.

You want more proof:

Lena Dunham-Spears and Britney Spears-Dunham.

They both like leather jackets:

Britney Spears makes Lena Dunham Faces:

Lena Dunham makes Britney Faces (and check out her Britney neck!):

Whether or not the media has been “nicer” to Britney Spears or to Lena Dunham is up for debate. I would argue that Britney Spears had a gradual fall from grace, while people had strong feelings about Lena Dunham the second she appeared on HBO. Though both women seem to deal differently with issues of appearance–Dunham preferring to appear on camera with little makeup and Spears often caking it on–they both are attacked for their appearance, and it hurts. It might actually hurt us more than it hurts either of these women specifically, because it sends a message to society that it is ok to denigrate women. I am reminded of the tearful Chris Crocker video in which he asked people to lay off Spears, who was going through a tough time:

In light of the recent Oscars show, where host Seth McFarlane made it clear that the only thing women in entertainment are good for is entertaining men, it becomes clear that this culture of trashing women is pervasive and poisonous and needs to end. Whether you choose to adhere to typical expressions of femininty or not,  if you are a woman, someone will always be there to attack you or remind you that you are there to be judged, even if you are only 9 years old, as Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis was when McFarlane suggested her body would no longer be of sexual use to George Clooney when she was over 18. How disgusting. Perhaps it is heartening that the Oscars have been panned, and maybe it signals some sort of sea-change, wherein female public figures are not judged first for their looks and then for their docility, however more likely it means absolutely nothing. The show will go on. BTW, South Park has always been way better than Family Guy anyway.

Just weeks after the suicide of Canadian teen Amanda Todd, Garcia’s death exemplifies a disturbing trend not only in suicide of young girls, but in subsequent media coverage. Both the New York Post and the Daily News claim Garcia had sex with four members of the football team, but do not cite their sources. For such a claim, a bit more than “police sources” is warranted. The New York Post claims Garcia had sex with “four men at once,” they too neglected to include specific sources. They are now reporting Garcia engaged in “an orgy” that was videotaped, according to unnamed sources. Not only is Garcia dead, she is the only one whose identity has been revealed, making the reported sex act all about her participation in it, rather than the subsequent actions of those who may have bullied her to death.

FYI high school boys, if you find a girl who is down with sleeping with even ONE of you, she should be worshiped, not ridiculed. The New York Post described Garcia’s death thusly:

A Tottenville High School student jumped in front of a train after she was bullied for having sex with four football players at the same time during a party after a game this weekend, sources said. [NY Post Lede]

Using the phrase: “bullied for” implies that there was a reason Garcia was bullied, as if she did something wrong. While sleeping with four football players might not be everyone’s cup of tea, there is nothing inherrently “wrong” with it. Surely the football players didn’t think anything was wrong with it at the time. The only newspaper that has done anything close to decent coverage of Garcia’s tragic demise is Staten Island Live, reporting that police are investigating the possibility of a sex tape.

As with the Amanda Todd case, Garcia is being mocked and shamed in death in a manner that is both cruel and indicative of what she may have endured while she was alive:

A screen shot from http://truenewsusa.blogspot.com/2012/10/junior-nympho-15-year-old-felicia.html

While Garcia’s suicide is tragic, and while teens bullying other teens should not be tolerated, what is more upsetting is that adult members of the media are covering this story in a way that perpetuates the idea that female promiscuity is something warranting shame, attack or humiliation. The “she was asking for it” mentality that condones mistreatment of certain women for their perceived lack of values or morals is alive and well in American culture and it needs to be stopped.

Felicia Garcia above, photos from Radar Online.

While we are thrilled to have the traffic, it brings up some really deep philosophical questions about both human nature and the nature of the Internet.

Fake Pretty has essentially become popular on the back of a dead girl. Amanda Todd killed herself after she was stalked and made fun of on the Internet, then tried to reach out to others through the Internet for solace shortly before her suicide. And in death, Amanda Todd has become a meme, figment of the Internet’s imagination, a phenomenon usually reserved for cute photos of cats with bread on their faces or auto-tuned children. In death, the Internet tried to fight for Amanda; the Hacker group known as “Anonymous” released the alleged name of Todd’s initial tormentor so that vigilante justice could be exacted.

On YouTube, people are posting videos of Amanda Todd singing in their feeds so that visitors will click on their streams. Numerous “Amanda Todd” Facebook accounts have appeared and garnered millions of “likes” in her name.

On Twitter, another teenager named Amanda Todd is flummoxed at her new-found popularity. In the midst of defending her identity and vitality, she asks:

Todd has become such a phenomenon that people are wondering if the story is a hoax. Her tale has become, in a word, unreal or symbolic. Parents may tell it to children as a warning: don’t share pictures on the Internet with strangers or this could happen to you! Teenage girls may see it as an essay on the dangers of female promiscuity, curious people just want to see photos.

Watching Amanda Todd’s YouTube videos, she sort of becomes unreal–as if her channel, “TheSomebodyToKnow,” is some newfangled “Blair Witch Project” promo. How could a girl who was this public about her pain (someone who had already attempted suicide once)– how could this girl be so ignored and then so noticed? Who is Amanda Todd? Who was Amanda Todd?

When is the movie coming out?

Perhaps our attempts to fictionalize her or claim ownership of her story stem from disbelief that someone could have cried out in pain so publicly and not have been heard. Or, perhaps as Vancouver Sun’s Pete McMartin writes, our fascination stems from our ability to

 ”… watch a tortured young girl foreshadow her death on the very thing that caused her so much grief. How many of the millions of viewers of Amanda’s video saw the awful irony in that, that the virtual world had become both her outlet and her prison?”

McMartin concludes:

But I can’t help feeling that her video illustrated not only her torment, but contained in it the seed of our own sickness, our own outlet and prison.”

We look at her videos to try and make meaning of a world in which this could happen. Some of us turn into philosophers or youth advocates, others turn into jokers or slut shamers, still more coast apathetically on the crest of Todd’s Internet wave until it too crashes upon the shore.

We are interested in her story because on the Internet, we are all Amanda Todd– anonymous, reaching out, screaming to be heard and hiding at the same time. On the Internet, we are all (as Amanda Todd sang) “outside looking in.”

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Never before have I seen child suicides pitted against each other. What could be so polarizing about Todd? The answer came in the form of a video the young Vancouver girl made, shortly before her suicide.

In the over eight-minute-long video, Todd tells viewers that her troubles started when she went on a webcam chat and flashed a guy at his request. The man later found her and made her life hell, causing her to switch schools (the hacker group anonymous released a video today claiming they had discovered who Todd’s initial tormentor was).

Todd then had a fling with a guy who had a girlfriend. The boy she liked came after her, along with his girlfriend and others. She was physically attacked. She publicly claimed the affair was all her fault to protect him. She was so tormented after this misdeed that she drank bleach and started cutting herself. She switched schools, but no one at her old school would forget about her, and they kept posting pictures on Facebook to humiliate her.

Today, less than a week after the 15-year-old’s death by hanging, memes making fun of her for drinking bleach continue to be circulated. The Twitter peanut gallery has turned her death into a lesson for young girls everywhere: if you make a mistake involving your body, even when you die, we won’t care. People are claiming Todd did more than just flash the initial guy, as if that somehow condemns her, they also call her a drug addict, as if that means we should care less.

Frankly it’s disgusting.

Todd is not just a victim of cyberbullying, she is a victim of vicious and violent sexism entrenched in our culture. It’s a force so pervasive, that sometimes the only way out for a young girl is death.

It’s possible Todd thought her death might make people think twice about humiliating girls for their sexual mistakes. Maybe she thought the people who bullied her might feel bad or think twice before treating another young girl this way. However, cultural attitudes towards women are so set in stone that nothing–not even the suicide of a young girl like Todd– can reverse them. In fact, misogynists are taking Todd’s suicide as validation for their misbegotten practice of slut shaming.  Though it is painful to see the world to react to Todd’s suicide in a less than compassionate way, I hope it makes young girls everywhere think twice about taking their own lives. The justice you deserve will only be attained if you live on to fight for it. RIP Amanda Todd. It doesn’t “get better,” we just get better at dealing with it.

*Editors note: Images are screen shots taken from various websites today, Tuesday October 16, 2012.

Images have been modified to prevent their proliferation in an unintended manner.