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In her latest venture, radio DJ and model Vogue Williams presents a four part series on RTÉ called Vogue Williams – On The Edge. Each episode tackles a different issue relevant to today’s society, with particular attention given to those problems faced by Millennials. These topics include synthetic drugs, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria and social anxiety. Throughout the series Williams interviews a variety of people from a wide range of backgrounds, succeeding in giving viewers a thorough understanding of how the issues raised affect young people in today’s society.
In the first episode, “Transgender Warriors”, Williams meets a variety of people with different gender identities. This episode was innovative in pushing the boundaries of gender representation on television. At ‘Gender Odyssey’ in Seattle, one of the World’s largest gender identity conferences, we hear from a man who gave birth to his own daughter. We also see many people who have been subjected to abuse and assaults because they don’t conform to a stereotypical gender role. Their bravery and honesty really amazed me as I saw how difficult it can be for some people to live the life they want to due to other people’s lack of understanding and education. I particularly enjoyed this episode as I felt it provided some insight into a topic which many people don’t know much about. The show kept me entertained with the honest and heartfelt stories told by the people interviewed, while also educating me on the range of the gender spectrum and contributing to my overall understanding of transgender people’s experiences. I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Williams when she spoke about how the position of the trans community is at the same impasse the gay community was twenty years ago. “It would be nice if everyone understood it, and nobody found it strange,” Williams said.
In the second episode, Williams strives to understand the mindset of our generation, a generation obsessed with extreme notions of physical beauty. As well as meeting several people obsessed with their body-image to their detriment, Williams herself enters a body-building bikini competition. These competitions see hundreds of young women starve themselves of nutrients and water and pump themselves up on fat burners, protein powders and in extreme cases, steroids, all in an effort to attain the ‘perfect body.’ This episode was uncomfortable to watch. The extremes that people were willing to go to change their bodies were distinctly unnatural and very saddening in some instances. With the images of bulging muscles and veins popping out from my TV screen, I questioned the sanity of some of these individuals and wondered just how dangerous our preoccupation with our self-image has become.
The third episode is the most frightening and eye-opening of the series. It deals with the dangers posed by the internet, from cyberbullying, to cat-fishing, to scamming. It focuses in particular on the of dangers present for young people and children. We meet a young woman who was kidnapped as a child by a paedophile who she met online, and hear of how she was starved and sexually assaulted, coming extremely close to the point of death. However, this episode also looks at the positive developments being made in the sector of online crime prevention, which added a note of optimism – something the other two episodes lack. Williams meets a woman who started to bring cases to court against paedophiles and revenge porn perpetrators after her own daughter was scammed. This issue is one Williams clearly feels very passionate about, and she opens up more in this episode than in any of the others. She explains how she herself has fallen victim to one such scam in the past. Her own personal image was tarnished when her face was photoshopped onto a naked body and the image disseminated across porn sites.
Throughout the fourth and final hour-long episode of the series, synthetic drugs and legal highs are tackled. Williams travels from the streets of Dublin to a Swedish music festival to hear about how new drugs are affecting people’s lives. In Dublin, she talks to people living on the streets about how these newly emerging synthetic drugs are in reality much more lethal than any of the regular street drugs we’re more familiar with. This is largely due to the fact that the potency of these new unregulated drugs is relatively unknown, resulting in a much higher likelihood of a fatality from overdose. This was the case with Alex Ryan, a young man from Cork who died when he overdosed on the ‘N-bomb’ drug. The pain and devastation felt as a result of his death is articulated by his sister, who has started a campaign to highlight the dangers of synthetic drugs.
Without a doubt, Vogue Williams tackles some very current and relevant issues for young people in this series. The show acts as a great tool for educating us about the problems facing our society today. However, at times Williams’s presentation style let the show down. Her discussion felt slightly forced and I found myself getting bored while listening to her. It made me question whether she really succeeds as a TV presenter. Whatever your take on Williams’ presentation skills however, these programmes are a valuable asset if you’re looking to expand your knowledge on current issues and I would highly recommend watching them.
