Reality ‘equality’

“PUSSYCAT Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll,” a clone of “America’s Next Top Model” that begins at 9 tonight on the CW, is positioned as feministic -- an updating of Gloria Steinem going undercover as a Playboy Bunny, only minus a good bit of the self-awareness. The Pussycat Dolls is a band of all women, whose instruments are their bodies and their attitudes, which is stripper chic; they’re long and lithe and young -- pretend down-and-dirty, like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” or a pole-dancing teacher among studio executive wives.

“Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me” goes the refrain of the Dolls’ most recognizable hit, “Don’t Cha.” It’s a goof on girl empowerment, via terrifying sexuality and trash-talking at the mall. It’s downscale from “Next Top Model” but with a similar premise: a bunch of 18- to 24-year-old girls vie for inclusion in the coolest clique in school.

On “Doll,” they have to be able to dance and sing. But more crucially, it comes down to what Pussycat Dolls creator and den mother Robin Antin euphemistically describes as “confidence.” To borrow from the great OutKast, she’s talking about the nerve to shake it like a Polaroid picture.

Antin is too soft for the Cruella De Vil role the show requires; she more exudes Heidi Fleiss -- a woman of vague skill sets beyond a deep closet of couture and an innate sense of how to make sex sell. But she is a reality show legacy: Her hairdresser brother Jonathan is the star of Bravo’s “Blow Out.”

Both are up-from-the-streets-of-Beverly-Hills success stories. The Pussycat Dolls’ official website informs that the group was Robin Antin’s idea, back in the ‘90s, when she was a budding choreographer rooming with actress Christina Applegate. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that garage -- history being made amid the smell of leaking oil from a white Bimmer.

She tells would-be Dolls to own their bodies and refine their vibes. As on “Top Model,” or HBO’s “Rome,” the high priestess is surrounded by haughty acolytes and dispassionate Iagos, and when Miss Robin deems the girls have worked hard enough she treats them to this strange ritual called dinner.

Spoiler alert: There is contestant vomiting on the first episode of “Pussycat Dolls,” and the producers would have us believe it’s some sort of virus. On “Next Top Model,” which airs Wednesday nights at 8, they don’t have to show you girls throwing up, it’s just implied. Now in its eighth iteration, “Next Top Model” so acutely reflects the bloodless appraisals of an A-list high school clique that it makes “Heathers” look like the No Child Left Behind Act.

Last week, in the two-hour season premiere, the show, which is hosted by former supermodel Tyra Banks, went from 32 would-be models to 13, and then to the 12 contestants who return tonight. They have already survived a rather macabre fashion shoot in which they were assigned the pro or con of a divisive social issue -- pro-gay marriage, anti-gay marriage, pro-vegan, pro-carnivore.

The latter had contestant Cassandra vamping over a display of hamburgers and sausage.

“I would rather see you kind of tearing apart a chicken, it would feel more editorial than picking up the hamburger,” said fashion judge Jay Manuel.

Manuel was recently seen on E!’s red carpet coverage of the Oscars, using the Glam-O-Strater to diagram ingenue dresses (it’s what John Madden would do if he were gay and not into football). The Glam-O might have been helpful here; Manuel could have drawn circles around the chicken.

Putting models around food is provocative enough, but then there was Jaslene, a twiggy, slightly crazed Latina, wearing a leather bondage outfit. I thought her cause was pro-sadomasochism, but it turned out to be “pro-death penalty,” while Sarah, wearing heavy black eye liner and handcuffed to a cell, was “pro-life-in-prison.”

Isn’t the opposite of the death penalty no death penalty? Should Jaslene, instead of dungeon leather, have been posed over Cassandra’s platter of burgers, to signify a last meal?

“There tends to be two different types of convicts,” Banks surmised of the penal system by way of assessing Sarah’s life-in-prison poses, which had failed to pop. “There’s the one that just feels like, ‘Oh my God, I’m just gonna die here and I feel so sad,’ and then there’s the one that everybody is scared of in the jail. Cause they’re crazy! ... So there’s two different ones, and you didn’t do either.”

I can’t tell you what it takes to be a Pussycat Doll (“sassy but classy,” is one of Antin’s clues), but I’m pretty sure becoming a “Next Top Model” involves being rather tall and very thin, though not body-mass-index-below-18 thin, which is what got five models barred from Madrid Cibeles catwalk last month.

At the end of its premiere, Banks was crowing that, for the first time in the show’s history, the judges had put through two plus-sized girls. Diana has a 31-inch waist and 45-inch hips! She also has little hope of winning. Those arms, I can’t see bone. I’d say the forecast for Diana is slight chance of glory; tears likely.

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll’

Where: The CW

When: 9 to 10 tonight

Rating: TV-PG-D (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for suggestive dialogue)

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‘America’s Next Top Model’

Where: The CW

When: 8 to 9 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-DL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language)