The newspapers, radio stations and even rival networks have been lambasting the show since it aired on Tuesday night - as well they should.

For myself, it was not so much the characters on the "dramality" - or should I say banality - show that irked me, but the content.

Of course, I have to try to believe that the "characters" are just that, and that there really are no young women on earth like Vernesa and Sophie. If that is not the case then my hope the human race will continue to thrive has been surely dashed.

After having been confronted with the realities of eating disorders on a very personal front over the past few weeks, what angered me more than the plastic, fake tans, Daddy's girl and chauvinism, was the show's intentional focus on image, bodies and the belief that looking a certain way is the only way to get ahead in the world today.

I remember vividly the show Ray Martin did with a young Melbourne teenager called Bronte Cullis who was suffering from anorexia back in the early 1990s. His documentary of her struggle to stay alive sparked a conversation in Australia about the media's role in shaping the beliefs of young men and women about what it considered to be beautiful.

Even as recently as five years ago, there were still moves by fashion magazines to use real-size models, to highlight the fact that many of the images our daughters, sisters, cousins, and friends see gracing the covers of the glossies, or beamed into our living rooms via TV have been digitally manipulated to create that deception of perfection.

But it seems these messages of keeping it real have been tossed aside like the last series of Big Brother.

Instead, Vernesa and Sophie talk about how much better it is to be pretty rather than smart, and we cringe as Bekaa's two asexual friends tell her she has a fat bum, and comment that her new nose job goes some way in taking the attention away from it.

Of course, eating disorders are not created purely because men and women feel they do not live up to the ideal of modern society, but the fact that today's quest for beauty has gone to such extremes as having lips botoxed to within an inch of their lives - or the bottom of your nose, whichever comes first - is a sad reflection of what is now considered acceptable.

The pin-up girls of the '40s and '50s had shapely legs, buxom bustlines, generous hips and lines on their foreheads when they showed emotion - from joy, sadness, anger or even disbelief.

If The Shire and its characters are to be believed, curves, laugh lines, lips that close and real breasts make for an ugly wench.

Everyone has self-doubts about the way they look, about how they're perceived and whether they will be accepted by others, but the older we get the easier it is to understand that beauty really is only skin deep - unless you come from The Shire where, apparently, beauty is only as deep as the next Botox injection.

By targeting an audience of young and impressionable men and women, Channel Ten has put the cause of all those working trying to make the next generation believe in themselves back by about 20 years - to the times when Bronte Cullis believed that there was no such thing as being too thin.

And by creating celebrities out of people like Vernesa, Sophie and Bekaa we are encouraging young women to aim only as high as the next cosmetic surgery chair rather than reaching for the stars and changing the world.