The latest example of this cautious coming out was Tyra Banks inaugurating the fifth season of her eponymous talk show on Tuesday with "Hair Liberation Day," in which she promised to appear minus any flowing weaves, clip-ons and wigs that she has professionally never been without (watch a video clip here). She delivered on that promise -- the hair was indeed weave-free and, compared to the cascading looks of the last 10 years, downright minimalist. But Tyra pulled a rare punch. The hair was all hers, all right, but it was still straightened in the manner of lots of black women's hair, including the first lady's. And when Tyra's stylist got through with it, the supermodel emerita had a cloud of shoulder-length curls that was technically more ethnic than a weave, but as "done" as any 'do she's ever sported. A change? Certainly. Pretty? For sure. Revolution? Not hardly. Black people may be getting more honest about their hair habits, but that doesn't mean they're ready to go cold turkey. Can't get too crazy now.

This was a letdown to those of us who were hoping Ms. Banks would show the way back to natural hair -- that is, curly-to-kinky black hair not beaten into submission with chemicals or straighteners. My letdown peaked into indignation when Tyra urged one black woman “challenger” on the show who confessed to hating her nappy, natural hair to chuck the weave to which she had become almost psychologically addicted. The chastened woman joined Tyra on stage -- with real hair that was a bit shorter than before but straight and shiny as glass. The stylist declared it beautiful, while the audience applauded and Tyra praised the woman for beating the demons of racial self-hatred. Really? That must be another show.

Of course I was expecting too much. The latest Tyra event was a mere gimmick, another top-this move typical of the overheated talk show/reality show/extreme-makeover circuit. But the drama surrounding the scaled-back look of a black celebrity, underwhelming though it turned out to be, did speak to something genuine. The constant critiquing of the Obamas' looks, from Michelle's shorts to the girls' braids, has black people thinking harder about an old racial wound that's never gone away: the tyranny of beauty standards. White people talking about black hair practices now doesn't mean we're giving those practices up -- when the dust from the black-power '60s and '70s settled, the hot combs and hair grease were still around -- but we are talking more frankly about them and what they represent. There is a very practical reason for black women to liberate their hair in 2009: money. The cost of maintaining weaves and other hair enhancements, considerable in any era, is especially prohibitive in a recession. It also helps that the blinged-out, ghetto-fabulous looks of the '90s and early aughts -- weaves, colored eye contacts -- seem to be finally running their course. The Obamas are adding a welcome new definition to the tired black descriptive, "urban," and it's about time; long defined by image extremes, blacks are now in a mood to champion image moderation.

There is some leftover '60s mojo in all this. No, the Obamas and Tyras of the country are not the poor or oppressed who raised their fists 40 years ago. But the black middle class has gotten beat up, too. Ongoing conservative backlash has killed affirmative action and dried up any empathy for the inner cities and ghettos from which the black middle was grown. Blacks, especially successful ones, know they have fit in as much as they're going to fit in -- what have we really got to lose now by taking off the wig? Far from post-racial, blacks are post-assimilation. We'll keep the fake hair and hot combs if we choose, but with a new attitude that doesn't fear white discovery -- or black shame. When Tyra announced last week that her hair would be “out and free,” it's clear she was talking mainly to those black girls (like her, no doubt) whose self-regard is too closely measured by the length, texture and general acceptability of their hair as pretty or “good.” She meant free from the burden of white-as-pretty, free as in free at last.

She did make a good messenger. Tyra's famous for letting it all hang out; in the past she's been almost proud to pull the curtain back by chatting about her cellulite and letting herself be photographed with no makeup. Clearly, hair is the last frontier for her, though it's a bigger field to conquer than she might have imagined.

To wit: I couldn't help noticing that Tyra was working that weave right up to the day of the Tuesday unveiling. I thought, will this bit of progress last? Will Tyra, like James Brown before her in his brief "I'm Black and I'm Proud" moment -- in which he jettisoned his famous process and went Afro -- return to form? Maybe, though I'm sure by then Tyra will describe going back to a weave as nothing more significant for her than putting on a hat, which is what she said Tuesday. It also could depend who's in the White House three years -- I mean, three seasons -- from now. 

Not Sarah Palin! No, this wizard decided the best way to tackle the (understandably irritating) problem of her loose-lipped would-have-been son-in-law was to publicly rebuke the kid, in a grandiose statement of denial and affronted morals, the weekend before the offending interview was to air, thereby ensuring that the episode of "Tyra" would become must-see television.

Which is how I wound up sitting in front of "The Tyra Banks Show" on Monday afternoon, watching a multi-segment interview with 19-year-old Levi Johnston, his sister Mercede and mom Sherry, who together gave an empty-calorie interview that touched on Levi's sex life with the former vice-presidential candidate's daughter, the tensions between the Johnston and Palin families and the inability of Levi and his kin to gain access to young Tripp Palin, access that is not likely to get any smoother thanks to their time on Tyra's couch.

Palin really should have watched the interview before fluffing this flaccid 40 minutes into a full-blown media tempest. In her statement this weekend, she made the whole thing sound way more exciting than it was, accusing the Johnstons of "engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion of [Levi and Bristol's] relationship," as part of what Palin called their "quest for fame, attention, and fortune." (It would also have been wise of Palin to avoid using words like "distortion," "exaggeration" and "lies" in the same statement in which she described her daughter Bristol's interest in "advocating abstinence," when in fact, six weeks ago, Bristol told Greta Van Susteren that abstinence is "not realistic.")

But Palin has never been known for her nimble handling of nuance, or truth, or words.

So here everyone was, thanks to Tyra's best publicist, Gov. Palin, to see what the fuss was about. As it turned out: absolutely nothing. Levi Johnston showed up in an untucked button-down, grey pants and a bright blue sweater vest, sounding no more or less like an anxious dumbass than you might expect of a teenager who wants to talk about his private life on "Tyra."

He was affable and monosyllabic, giving mostly grunting "yes" and "no" answers to Banks' questions. Did he cheat on Bristol? "No." Had he moved in with the Palins before Tripp's birth? "Yes." Did he and Bristol share a room? "Yes."

But Levi was downright eloquent in comparison to Banks, who treated him with a combination of condescension and obsequiousness unmatched in my recent television watching experience.

When Banks grabbed Johnston's hand -- her nails painted a bilious green -- to show off the "Bristol" tattoo he'd gotten on his ring finger, she spoke to him as if he were a toddler. Pointing out that he was a teen dad, she felt free to affectionately note, "you're like a baby yourself!" At another point, when she inquired about whether he and Bristol practiced safe sex, Banks creepily rubbed her hand on Johnston's knee, assuring him he was on "Tyra's couch" and could answer personal questions.

When she wasn't coddling, sympathizing with or inappropriately touching him, Banks was voicing repeated wonderment at the fact that Johnston and his family were "breaking their silence" by coming on her show.

The reason for the silence-breaking, according to Levi, was that "there have been a lot of things in the newspapers and news ... saying I'd done steroids and drugs and cheated on Bristol ..."

"That are lies," Banks helpfully affirmed, without ever asking whether he had, in fact, done drugs or steroids.

Levi, looking surprised at the easy credulity, added with something that sounded like mature perspective, "at the same time they're kind of funny, [the media] ain't got nothing better to do than pick on young kids."

Levi offered a raft of observations about how the course of young love does not always run smooth. Then, "I think we were ready for a kid," he stammered, "[but] she said she wanted to wait a couple of years or something like that?"

Here Tyra showed the clip to which Johnston was murkily referring, in which Bristol told Van Susteren that though she loved her son, and though Levi was a good hands-on father, she wished they had waited 10 years to have their child. At this, Johnston mildly concurred, saying, "I wish we probably would have waited a little but, at the same time, I wouldn't go back and trade it for anything."

Given the forum and circumstances, Johnston was relatively gracious, and even classy, when holding forth on both Bristol and her family. He said that the Palin family applied no pressure to get married, claiming that he and Bristol had always planned on marrying before the pregnancy: "We'd been together for a long time, it was something we'd always thought of." Asked what attracted him to Bristol at the beginning, Levi said, "Her whole family is big-time into hunting and fishing and that kind of thing. She's not a big-time shopper city girl. She's really smart, I guess, a pretty intelligent woman, and that's enough for me." He also allowed as how he believed Sarah Palin knew that he was having sex with her daughter, because "moms are pretty smart," and said that even though he assumed it would make it harder for him to see his son, he would still vote for Palin for president against Barack Obama (though the degree to which that admission was precipitated by his dislike of Obama was unclear).

The part of the interview that has already gotten the headlines is when Tyra asked him if he and Bristol practiced safe sex. He repeatedly answered yes. As she pressed him harder and harder about whether they were safe every time, he finally said, "Most of the time." Breaking news: Bristol and Levi sometimes didn't practice safe sex.

Banks' feints at media watchdogging were laughable. At one point, she asked Levi about reports that his MySpace page once read that he was a "red-neck" who did not want children. Yes, Levi said, but those MySpace comments were 3 years old, and had been dug up in the course of the campaign. "And the press'll make it seem like you said that after Bristol was pregnant," Banks pointed out reprovingly, not pointing to a single outlet that reported Levi's MySpace comments as post-pregnancy enunciations. "See how the press works? Mmmmhmmmm." Banks later congratulated herself and the Johnstons for not having been paid to be on the show, noting that "some journalists do that" but that that's not what had happened in this case."You all are not being paid and you are just here. That is so important and I think they deserve a round of applause."

But what was so barkingly obvious about the whole exercise was that the Johnstons didn't need to be paid for coming on a talk show. This is America. Someone in this family had the sense to know that, with their split from the Palins, their Warholian quarter-hour was winding up, and that a talk show tour might help them pad out the last 15. And that it might also be the only way to get some of their undoubtedly real and vexing frustrations into the open.

Mother Sherry wanted to say that there was more to the story of her arrest on drug charges than met the eye, and even though she was not free to talk about it, someday she would get her day in court and be able to explain that her story "had twists in it." Sister Mercede wanted to tell the story of how she wasn't allowed at the hospital the day that Tripp was born even though all of Bristol's cousins and friends were allowed in. Sherry wanted to say that she doesn't have any pictures of her grandson, and that Levi had always wanted to be a father, and how he used to say his son would be on skates before he would walk. Mercede wanted to talk about how the rumors that she's a jealous sister are untrue because the whole thing is that Bristol is jealous of her because she and Levi are so close, and she has a tattoo of Levi's name on her arm, and she warned Levi not to get the tattoo of Bristol's name on his finger.

Yes, if there was any crumb of a story revealed in this interview -- and the narrative value of that crumb would have to be weighed on a "Days of Our Lives" scale of hourly revelation -- it was that Bristol and Levi's breakup had much less to do with Bristol and Levi than it had to do with the girl-girl dynamics of the ruptured friendship between Bristol and Mercede. As Levi explained about the difficulty of seeing his son, "Her and my sister have gotten into some fights. They don't like each other very much. That's a big problem with her not letting me come over to the house."

As it turns out, Mercede was the crazy-pants star on "Tyra," as she surely was anxious to be. Frustrated, she said, at not being able to see her nephew, and at the bad press her family has received, Mercede was visibly brimming with a desire for the attention and publicity that had so unfairly landed on the shoulders of pregnant Bristol.

In another time, another tax bracket, another television genre, Mercede could have been a character on "My So-Called Life," regaling anyone who would listen -- please, please listen -- with underminey, labyrinthine, impenetrable adolescent narrative about how Bristol doesn't like how she's friends with a lot of Levi's exes and then one day she was out with a friend who used to date Levi in middle school and Bristol sent her a text about how she was white trash and her friends were white trash and then 10 minutes later all of Bristol's random friends were texting about the whole family was white trash and then someone -- uh, I wonder who? -- must have leaked it to the press that Bristol called her family white trash.

Whatever, cheddar. The thing is, Mercede is no different from any of the girls and boys who jabber mindlessly into the cameras on "My Super Sweet 16" or any reality show, thrilled that someone is pointing a camera at them and asking them to rattle on about their lives.

Why should the Johnstons be any better, or different, from the rest of America, which is encouraged by every reality show, every top chef and next model and bachelor and swapped wife, to believe that life in this country only really makes a mark if it is lived on television?

No wonder they wanted, or needed, to show up on "Tyra" and talk. Here they had been thrown into a spotlight that we are taught to crave. The lenses of a nation and a world were pointed at them, their family, their MySpace pages, their hockey games. But because of the strictures of a presidential campaign, and their association with a governor determined to control a story line that was clearly out of her control from the start, these people were never offered a mike.

So here. They got one. They are as boring and ordinary and dysfunctional as any other family to get on a talk show stage and tell an audience of their arguments, their disappointments, their sex lives and their text message fights. The only difference here is that their dull emissions were amplified by the interference of the woman who was trying to muffle them. In doing so, Sarah Palin only wound up drawing a wider audience, more of an impetus to keep talking, and a vivid example of why her friends, associates and family members would want to take up microphones and defy her. In her statement renouncing Levi, Palin not only repackaged Bristol's position on abstinence, she also made the following spooky and controlling statement: "Bristol realizes now that she made a mistake in her relationship and is the one taking responsibility for their actions."

Palin's unstoppable desire to speak for and talk over anyone around her -- be it her daughter, or her would-have-been son-in-law -- must be maddening. But it surely also inspires in them a desire to yell louder, and with greater defiance, to get Greta on the phone, or Tyra, if necessary, to rebel in any possible way from the steel-fisted but inept message mangler.

My hopes for young Piper growing into a radical feminist politician grow brighter by the day.

Please avail yourself of the clip on Banks' Web site, in which the talk show host grills him about whether Sarah Palin knew if he was having sex with her daughter ("I’m pretty sure she probably knew … moms are pretty smart") and if the couple practiced safe sex.

"Yeah," he responds, in a flat, utterly unconvincing way, like the kid who tells you he was not eating chocolate even as it is smeared all over his face.

"Even when the baby was conceived?" Tyra asks.

"We were."

Banks persists. "And there were just … wardrobe malfunctions?"

"I guess."

Oh come now, Levi. You did get the girl pregnant. Banks, disbelieving, continues to lean on him -- even his sister is shaking her head beside him on the couch -- until Johnston finally caves, saying, with a blush and a smirk, "Most of the time."

Now that's some quality television right there. Apparently the interview will also include discussions about the Republican National Convention and Levi's famous ring-finger tattoo.

At the Salon office, the appearance sparked some spirited discussion, the underlying question being: Why would a kid, mercifully released from the media glare, submit to this kind of cringe-inducing scrutiny? (And how much did he get paid? And would he be making an appearance on Maury Povich anytime soon?) Your thoughts on those questions are welcome.

If you've watched "America's Next Top Model" or "The Tyra Banks Show," you're probably familiar with the Tyra shtick -- overcoming adversity through hard work, the importance of an elongated neck, "fierceness" -- and this week's feature doesn't offer much in the way of new material. But that doesn't stop the Times' Lynn Hirschberg from gushing profusely. "Like a star athlete who has perfected a jump shot or a curveball, Banks has studied, honed and mastered the smile ... Banks always treated modeling as a kind of beautiful science," Hirschberg enthuses in the piece's opening paragraph. To show off Banks' scientific credentials, the profile offers an accompanying video and photo gallery, in which Banks demonstrates seven smiles from her 275-smile repertoire. We get "the smile without eyes," "the smile with eyes only" and the extremely scary "surprise smile," among others. Some of the expressions display discernible modeling skill; in others, Banks just looks nuts. (I do wish the piece shared more smile names, like those for 251-253 -- at that point, don't you get into "thinking about peanut butter" or "Mormon"?) The tutorial is potentially useful for aspiring models, and entertaining for anyone with a mirror and half an hour to kill. But there's something unintentionally "Zoolander" about Banks -- who catches a fair amount of flak for being narcissistic -- boasting about spending enough time in front of the mirror to develop several hundred distinct facial expressions.

Of course, Banks' self-interest isn't incidental to her success or to the profile; packaging herself and talking about herself are central to her job. The magazine's cover features Banks dressed up as some kind of fierce '60s fembot, and poses the nonsensical-yet-obvious question: "Martha. Oprah. Tyra: Is she the next big female branded self?" She certainly hopes to be, and that's how we wind up with a six-minute video juxtaposing assorted smiles with snippets from the Tyra success story on the Times home page.

Is this newsworthy? Not really. But as the profile points out, Banks is big with young women of various backgrounds and ethnicities, and thus is succeeding with a market segment that TV networks -- and newspapers -- have an increasingly tough time reaching. If she intersperses the personal monologues with body-acceptance bromides, educational vulva puppetry and other tactics ostensibly designed to instill self-esteem in young girls, so much the better. It would be nice if "the next big female branded self" could reach past the women's-media staples of weight issues, boyfriend problems, makeovers and the necessity of shaking one's booty. It would also be nice if the Times Magazine opted to run back-to-back cover stories about women and both stories weren't fluffy me-me-me pieces. We're not quite there yet. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with the entertainment value of 275 smiles.