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Fashion Models: Victims of Oppression or Instigators?

I have known several women who have been involved in modeling for magazines and advertisements. They were all, of course, beautiful and thin. When I asked them what message they thought they were sending to young women they replied that is was “art” or an “expression of beauty.” They claimed that they were empowered because they were used their bodies for “art” and vanity had nothing to do with it. Well of course they are empowered; they’re thin and beautiful (what we as a society consider normal). They’re not normally oppressed for their looks and probably never have been. The question then follows…How can you be empowered while not being oppressed? Models may be oppressed as far as the stereotyping of being the bulimic or anorexic model, uneducated, and sexual in nature. It is also fair to say, however, that they are of the “privileged” few who are offered more opportunities socially than the middle to lower class. So are models victims of oppression or are they fueling the oppression of “ugly” or “non-average” woman? It’s difficult to say because oppression falls on a wide spectrum of areas of life, not just looks. Personally, I believe that models do indeed fuel this warped societal idea of what “beautiful” should be (thin, tan, symmetrical, airbrushed, big boobs). They are however, victims in the sense that they have everyone hounding them for believing the same thing I do. They’re considered vain creatures of society who flaunt their beauty for no other reason than to boost their own ego and say “look at me.” While I do think that we should see less typical models and more “plus sized” and ethnic models, we cannot (as a society) fault the models themselves for being the cause of oppression of the “unattractive.” To answer my own question, I believe models can both instigate and fuel oppression in the physical realm but are also victims of oppression as the female gender and being placed in the category of a sexual icon.