I watched some! Sorry - but this is so close to the UK version. I can’t stand it long enough to wait to see if the product test bits are in there - but the fact that an anti-ageing cream ad fronts each segment of each episode says it all.

You remember how long it takes to work out that the positive article in the women’s magazine is simply a way to get a wider audience in to read the (destructive) advertisements etc… And how it takes a while to notice that the ‘positive’ article actually is pretty good in some ways but really isn’t positive overall… And how we eventually realise that a sentence like… “Nowadays it’s become much more acceptable to have a series of sexual encounters, so be who you want to be” is actually saying “but of course it’s still not really acceptable and you should aim to be a virgin with lots of sexual experience” (whereas a ‘men’s’ article - sitting alongside adverts showing power and influence and money - takes it for granted that it’s OK - and that monogamy is OK too…)

Well - this is just the TV version. The whole thing is so seductive - but simply shifts the goalposts yet again.

The UK version is very very good in some respects:
- Real shapes of women (big and small and in between) - and enough of them shown to see what real women look like. And they are shown smiling.
- The individual women feel much better about themselves by the end, and mostly look pretty good in the clothes that are suggested (not least because they are proud to be themselves).

And it is bad in many other respects:
- There is a test of a product type in each episode - e.g. face cream to remove wrinkles. This is presented as if it is somewhat scientific but it’s a load of ****.
- The presenter still talks about ‘your good bits’ or ‘bad bits’ and invariably prescribes horrible squash-you-tummy-in long underwear things.
- The clothes are almost always decorative rather than particularly functional (great for a party or a night out, but not so good for the office or for a management role where you have to be outside sometimes).

I like looking at this subject from a whole-society point of view - imagining that there’s a conspiracy to keep power away from women. This sounds less crazy when we find out that in systems theory there doesn’t actually have to be an actual conspiracy… society will still work as if there is (look up ‘emergence’ on Wikipedia).

From that starting point, what I see is:

There’s a bit of a backlash against the overwhelming ‘thin is good’ social message. (Currently this ‘thin-is-good’ message serves to distract women - to get women to spend time and money on an unreachable goal, and to almost guarantee that women generally feel less confident than men generally.) Rather than fighting that backlash, it’s more effective for society (trying to maintain the power imbalance) to work with it… so the new message becomes: “YES! Welcome to the new world! No more oppression! It doesn’t matter what size you are, so long as you study really carefully what you wear, and learn to hide your bad bits and emphasise your good bits, you too can get your appearance right, and thus become desirable/confident/popular.”

Funny, but that doesn’t really sound radical to me.

It’s certainly a million miles from the message that I get (as a man) from society - which is something like: “Don’t worry! You’re great! Fine just as you are - whether fat (well built), thin (wiry), intelligent, stupid (down to earth), obsessive (an expert), violent (tough), weedy (gentle), etc etc etc etc. - you can be anything you want, and if you can’t then it probably wasn’t worth being anyway… ”

I’m not sure, but I also think that the series started better - and slowly slid into more and more of the rubbish stuff later. From the conspiracy point of view that approach works too.

Like I say - I hope yours is better - but keep awake to the possibility that this is just a repackaging of old messages.

I hope the US version does a good job. I know it focusses on helping women to ‘look and feel sexy’ and effectively turns them into pin ups, but these are not women who already feel confident or who accept an alternative paradigm of beauty, they are women who feel unattractive and desexualised.