Robert Bianco of "USA Today" called "The Swan" "hurtful and repellent even by reality's constantly plummeting standards". Journalist Jennifer Pozner, in her book "Reality Bites Back", calls "The Swan" "the most sadistic reality series of the decade". Journalist Chris Hedges also criticized the show in his 2009 book "Empire of Illusion", writing ""The Swan"'s transparent message is that once these women have been surgically 'corrected' to resemble mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their problems will be solved". Feminist scholar Susan J. Douglas criticized the show in her book "The Rise of Enlightened Sexism" for its continuation of a negative female body image, claiming that "it made all too explicit the narrow physical standards to which women are expected to conform, the sad degree to which women internalize these standards, the lengths needed to get there, and the impossibility for most of us to meet the bar without, well, taking a box cutter to our faces and bodies".