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"Just read a little item announcing the birth of yet another fashion-based reality show, premiering October 7 on VH1. This one&amp;amp;#8217;s called America&amp;amp;#8217;s Most Smartest Model and the idea is to do a big intelligence contest, winnowing a group of 16 man and lady mannequins down to one $100,000 winner. A hopeful person could think maybe the show&amp;amp;#8217;s idea is to disprove the stereotype that models are brainless meat puppets, but one glimpse at the above link to the casting special, and it&amp;amp;#8217;s obvious they aim to perpetuate it. Most of the &amp;amp;#8220;models&amp;amp;#8221; they&amp;amp;#8217;ve chosen are bottom-of-the-barrel skin-calendar types, clearly picked for their entertaining stupidity as opposed to their currency in the industry. (Q: &amp;amp;#8220;Who fought in the Civil War?&amp;amp;#8221; A: &amp;amp;#8220;Um, Germans?&amp;amp;#8221;) The notoriously sardonic Ben Stein&amp;amp;#8212;he of &amp;amp;#8220;Win Ben Stein&amp;amp;#8217;s Money&amp;amp;#8221; and a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon&amp;amp;#8212;is one of the hosts. So expect the withering insults to fly freely. Yes, we&amp;amp;#8217;ve all seen Zoolander. Or at least I assume we have&amp;amp;#8212;and if we haven&amp;amp;#8217;t, we need to run, not walk, to Blockbuster. But maybe because the target of the joke was specifically male models, and maybe because the movie was so completely silly all around, I found absolutely nothing objectionable about it except maybe Milla Jovovich&amp;amp;#8217;s accent. (I mean, the girl lived in the Ukraine til age six. How&amp;amp;#8217;d that happen?) And of course, there is an impulse in many people to scorn those who have won the genetic lottery. That&amp;amp;#8217;s not most evolvedest but it&amp;amp;#8217;s most commonest. Like the anorexic fashion editor cliche, the dumb model stereotype is crass and ignorant. Most of the successful ones on catwalks and in campaigns are very young girls, and so therefore not always the most confident or polished. But many of them speak several languages, and haven&amp;amp;#8217;t enough gone on to transcend posing to make us realize perhaps there are just as many dumb and smart models as there are dumb and smart people? I do not suffer fools gladly, and one of my best pals is a former model who, in the early 80s, used to work for Guy Bourdin before retiring to be a mom, then a PR exec, then a private chef, then a developer of TV shows and now a fashion executive. Does it simply take a pretty face to be as successful a businesswoman as the aforementioned Milla, Kate Moss, Gisele Bundchen, Heidi Klum, Elle Macpherson, Kimora Lee Simmons, Janice Dickinson (say what you want about her but she ain&amp;amp;#8217;t stupid) and of course, the original model/brand Cindy Crawford? I thought we all understood by now that pretty and smart were not mutually exclusive. This show will not do much to help that cause. Am I right to be offended here, or do I just need to lighten up? &amp;amp;#8212;Alex"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/dressed/2007/09/hysterical-or-just-insulting>