The new body image manifests itself in two ways. "Plus-size" model, Emme, is a paradigm of the "let's bring in one chubby girl to purge all our sins" mentality, while TLC's new video, "Unpretty," advocates a more effective female-bonding strategy.

Emme is hard to avoid these days. Everyone wants a piece of her. At 5'11" and 190 pounds, she undoubtedly espouses a new definition of beauty. Plus, as host of E!’s Fashion Emergency, author of a new book, True Beauty and full-time supermodel, she is no airhead. And, contrary to what mainstream media try to tell us, she is not fat. She IS voluptuous, athletic and full-figured, not to mention stunningly beautiful.

While Emme represents a step towards a broader definition of beauty, she is just that: a representation, a media token.

Weighing in at a size 14-16, she is, by far, the only supermodel to have remotely average dimensions. Approximately half of North American women wear a size 12 and up. Without doing the math, the problem is obvious: real women come in all different shapes and sizes but models do not. Girls and women are still taught that their bodies will never be adequate.

Now that the fashion industry is finally receiving the flack they deserve, they push Emme forth: "See, big can be beautiful." I highly doubt that we will see any more models like Emme in the near future.

The emphasis on the external that is so prevalent in Emme's world is downplayed in "Unpretty." The video follows a few different storylines: some guys heckling a girl about her physique as she walks out of school, a bulimic, a girl whose boyfriend convinces her to get breast implants and they even throw in some male vanity.

Ironically, the girls of TLC were grouped together to represent three beauty ideals (bad, Babyface). All three members act in the video (the bulimic character is another actress) and all experience some form of insecurity. Like the rest of us, they are human, not perfect.

By the end of the video, one girl pounds her harassers, the bulimic smiles as puts on a bathing suit, and the implant girl runs out of the clinique minutes before surgery.

Thus, self-acceptance is this video’s most important theme: you can fix anything you want, but if you don’t like yourself on the inside, you’ll never be happy.

Amazingly, this video speaks to everyone (even the boys...). Once we realize that we all have imperfections, and that we were not meant to strive towards one ideal, we can stop competing and work together to create new definitions of beauty. We can look to what makes us pretty, instead of letting others decide for us.

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Melanie