Australian model Bridget Malcolm is 29. That’s 70 in normal working person-years. Retirement. The beach. Early-bird dinners at Marie Callendar’s and dry genitalia. Definitely, time to step up and spill the industry secrets without concern for career backlash.
The former Victoria’s Secret and beachwear model took to any female media outlet that would have her to detail her mental illness struggles and the horrors of coming up as a young model. Your first instinct is to mock a tall, hot, skinny blonde with seven figures in career earnings in her 20’s when she bitches about anything. Then again, you weren’t working full-time at fifteen, and if you were, you likely weren’t being routinely sexually assaulted at work. That’s a tough teen gig.
Malcolm detailed what life is like after the creepy dude at the mall tells you he’s going to make you a modeling star. He’s 40 and fat. You’re 13 and weigh maybe five stone. Your parents should step in, but the thought of earning a buck off their pretty middle schooler overwhelms any critical thinking. Next thing you know you’re at a party with Jared Leto and a guy who used to play in Blues Traveler and there’s cocaine and molly and champagne in sippy cups for the little ones.
Malcolm says by sixteen she was being urged to starve herself to stay slender. Her agent suggested snorting coke and having regular sex to stay skinny. This sounds more fun than Keto, but might be considered weird advice to a girl who should be in high school struggling to figure out algebra. You might think to yourself, why didn’t she just quit, but then you don’t remember when you did during high school for five bucks an hour. Now imagine you were being paid fifty. What wouldn’t you do? Especially if your parents are reveling in you paying the rent and buying you coke straws to keep it rolling.
If you’ve already jumped ahead in this standard young model memoir cliche, you know Malcolm was routinely sexually assaulted by men at work. Not the Australian band Men at Work, though that would be something to sell your book to a publisher. The pervy men who litter the modeling industry like so many seagulls waiting to pick off leftover human food at the beach. Swoop down, grab a half-eaten bun. Or a teen model who hasn’t eaten in a week save for colorful pills and Tanqueray shots. Half of these dudes are gay predators, but that still leaves half to go hog wild on the waifs.
Modeling is just sex trafficking without a Bulgarian strong man taking all your money. Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows are dolled up cargo transport containers. Malcolm mentions how tiny her boobs got from perennial starvation, in case we’re looking for an angle for men to start expressing concern. If you’ve ever seen a V.S. model in backstage candid photos, you will note they are all extremely flat chested, have incredibly bad acne, and look like they just found out their dog died. Cattle look happier in the hatchet line. Granted, they know their suffering ends soon.
It’s hard for men to relate to the shittiness of being a teen model. It’s perhaps not so different than being a teen super athlete, with all the scavengers and parasites that start trying to exploit you for their own gain. Now imagine LeBron had Dave Stern finger-banging him every day and his circle told him to let it happen if he wants an NBA contract. Don’t imagine that for too long, it will stick in your head and slowly destroy you. Also, LeBron would’ve done it.
What to make of this nine-thousandth tell-all tale of “the modeling industry rapes young girls” by a former model? This isn’t like Will Smith playing a doctor who rushes in with CTE evidence the league’s been hiding so they can keep churning billions off their brain-damaged athletes. Everybody knows about the modeling industry, the disgusting practices, underaged sex assaults, and worst of all — clove cigarettes. And nobody cares. You can’t even blame the patriarchy for a fallback. Most of this now occurs under female-led senior management. Women will metaphorically sodomize the young talent just the same.
The more things change in the world, the more they really stay the same. Women like to shop. As do men who drive electric cars. It’s a huge business. Somebody needs to peacock those garments for sale. You stop selling billions in unnecessary fashion and two million nine-year-olds in China are suddenly out of their 80-hour a week garment factory jobs. Now, who’s being raped?
You can never stop the strong from preying on the weak. You can’t stop greed. This means skinny girls and their fey boy counterparts are still going to be grist in the sales wheel. This isn’t a slam against capitalism. Capitalism is amazing. Though less so when you employ child labor in your mines. We all sort of agreed to stop that ninety years ago when people got tired of seeing middle schoolers exit the mine coughing up bits of their preteen lungs.
In the U.S., entertainment is the exception we’ve carved out from child labor laws. Kid actors and models are allowed to work like adults. From baby on up. Once they hit schools years, they’re allowed to replace K-12 with fake courses-by-mail. Hint, mom never actually mails in your assignments, she dumps them in the trash. You’re guaranteed an A. Plus that paper you wrote in Pig Latin would be embarrassing for a child half your age. It’s okay. You won’t need to read in the future we have planned for you.
Hollywood studios and New York modeling agencies scored a sweet victory by convincing everybody it was normal for an eleven-year-old to be drinking high balls with a room full of middle-aged men at two in the afternoon and bitching about having to pay bills. Try using a sixth-grader to work in your warehouse loading pallets, see how long before you’re experiencing prison food. But if you’re putting on an underaged girl bikini photoshoot, you’re exempt. That’s weird, right?
Bridget Malcolm will now fade into the former-model-who-sells-boutique-knickknacks stage of her life. She’s already married a rock musician. She’s talking to teens about eating disorders and soon she’ll have a DIY working mom empowerment book. It’s all a game really. A sick one, but if you look at sex and drugs as fun work requirements as opposed to an existential threat, it wasn’t so bad. Oh, yeah, minus the rapes. Forgot that. LeBron metaphors never really hold up.
