I think they, and this whole culture in general, perpetuate an unfortunate feature of our society whereby perhaps the most "prestigious" thing for a woman to have, the quality that the world values, admires and envies most in her, is her sexual attractiveness.
(It's ironic that some people think this is women's liberation and feminism at its finest, when the fundamental purpose of a woman's sexual attractiveness is to please men. Essentially it becomes a case of their self worth being most majorly dependent on how much men like them).
Girls can get a barrage of compliments, attention, fame and fortune for doing something as easy and as useless as taking their clothes. As for the last woman to win a nobel prize for a scientific discovery - most of us probably haven't even heard of her. I wonder what kind of incentives this is supposed to offer to girls who are growing up in this era.
Not that I'm pinning the blame entirely on Kim Kardashian et al. because although they help to perpetuate this aspect of our culture, they're primarily symptoms of it. It's more deeply rooted than that.