'Model City,'
strutting pretty boys
BET reality series displays male models as objects
By Tom Conroy
Feb 17, 2010
Decades into the modern feminist movement, men and women are closer to achieving equality in at least one area: Women have become more comfortable treating men like sex objects and judging them solely on their looks.
That attitude should help “Model City,” a new reality series premiering on BET’s Centric channel on Thursday, Feb. 18, at 8 p.m. The show provides ample footage of the well-muscled torsos of various male models, which should distract viewers from the show’s inability to engage them either intellectually or dramatically.
The action in the first two episodes focuses on the rivalry between Ibrahim and Wendell, two black male models represented by a New York agency called Red Model Management, which specializes in minority models.
Wendell, who is 22, helps reinforce the stereotype that models are vapid and self-absorbed. “One of the perks of being a model, you walk into any arena of life and almost the red carpet is rolled out for you,” he says. “Why? You’re beautiful. Once you’re beautiful, people start to almost bow down to you.”
Ibrahim, who’s 40, stresses that he’s also a painter who studied at the Pratt Institute — “one of the most esteemed art colleges.” He says that Wendell is “full of caca.” Their beef may have started when Wendell claimed that he had posed for one of Ibrahim’s shots, a silhouette in an iPod advertisement.
The two models’ rivalry might be more interesting if it weren’t shown to us in such contrived ways. In the first episode, Ibrahim and Wendell pose with two other men for a magazine called Uptown. At the end of the episode, one of them is told that he “won” the shoot, whatever that means.
In the second episode, Ibrahim and Wendell pose with a beautiful female model for a seaside shoot that seems to have been staged solely for TV, specifically so they can be seen fighting for attention. Before the shoot, Ibrahim says that he’s never worked with Wendell before, suggesting that the episode was taped out of sequence.
Those moments reduce the credibility of the rest of the show. When one of the Red agents walks the streets of the city asking random attractive men if they’d like to audition for him, one wonders if that actually happens in real life or was just done for the cameras.
The sequence does lead to a segment in which a series of young guys parade in front of the agents with their shirts off.
One moment seems genuine. When another male model kisses his boyfriend at an agency party, Ibrahim and Wendell are shocked, as if they’d never seen a gay man in the New York fashion world.
Other than that, the first two episodes provide little that seems new or insightful about the lives of male models of color. Various people quote statistics about how hard it is for black men in the business, but the figures sound as if they were made up on the spot.
And the fact that Ibrahim is still working steadily at his age suggests that men in this field at least have a longer shelf life than women.
As much as models like Ibrahim might want to be judged by more than their visual appeal, “Model City” is basically content to stay on the surface. Since it’s a very attractive surface, that may be enough for most viewers.
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