Victoria's Secret Flesh Show

Call me a prude (it won’t be the first time), but has the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show crossed the line from sexy to sleazy? When the moves got fancy on the runways I walked, they involved diors and pivots and the unbuttoning and removing of jackets, not suggestive shaking of derrières and cleavage and removing of…well, the VS models enter wearing next to nothing, so there really isn’t much left to remove.

Touted as “the greatest fashion event on earth,” Victoria’s Secret annual televised runway extravaganza is for many non-fashionistas the only “fashion” show they’ll watch all year. (Those italics indicate that the show is more one of flesh than of fashion.) So, that means some 8 million-plus viewers are getting the wrong idea about what modeling is like—as they almost always do from every TV show, magazine article, or book out there on the subject. It’s enough to make us regular models throw up our arms (some bony, some not) in despair, turn off the TV for two years, and write a book about what modeling is really like. Oh yeah, one of us—me—did that. Make sure you sign up (home page, lower right corner) to get an e-mail as soon as copies are available!

I digress. My point is that most models don’t prance down runways in lingerie, and, even if they do, the audience rarely gets a sense they’ve seen the models’ moves before in, say, Hooters or maybe at that bachelor party in Vegas. While I marveled at the VS Angels’ mastery of such confident struts in their teeny-tiny outfits and teetering shoes down such a long runway in front of such a huge audience, I simultaneously found myself cringing when the camera zoomed in on a model’s breasts and she obligingly leaned forward and gave a little crowd-pleasing jiggle. Yikes, is this what it has come to? I swear Klum and co. weren’t doing that move at the premier show in 1995.

Back then, I would have walked that runway and had my parents watch. In 2010, I couldn’t help but wonder if the models’ relatives—mom, dad, gramma—were proud or appalled by what they saw. Same for the folks watching their aspiring-model daughters vying, with such gusto, to win a walk down that runway (in a new Victoria’s Secret contest that added that requisite reality TV twist to the show). Were they cheering them on or hoping they’d get off that slippery slope and hightail it back home to their SAT review books?

Not only have the moves changed since ’95, but the things these models are shaking around have too. I’m sure the real-to-fake boob ratio would have been more in my favor fifteen years ago. Now? The laws of gravity don’t seem to apply to Angels, nor do the laws of proportion. A wise model friend of mine once reassured me about my less-than-voluminous Bs. She said some men prefer curvy women; others like waif types. Victoria’s Secret has trademarked a new option: the curvy waif. In VS land, they are everywhere! Mother Nature isn’t nearly as cruel; she rarely spits out one of those impossibly lithe yet voluptuous creatures.

Does this mean I won’t watch the show next year? Nah, I’ll watch. The show has some titillating elements: great music, over-the-top costumes, glitz, glamour, stupendously gorgeous models, suspense (who might trip? can their legs get any longer?), eroticism, voyeurism… But just remember, Angels, as you’re wiggling and jiggling, we are watching—8 million-plus of us, maybe gramma, hopefully not my husband…