The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild by Douglas Susan J

Author:Douglas, Susan J. [Douglas, Susan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2010-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

7

REALITY BITES

In the spring and summer of 2000, when not much was happening except what would turn out to be the most consequential presidential campaign in modern history, America became transfixed by a new show: Survivor. Eight men and eight women volunteered to be marooned on a tropical island filled with palm trees, venomous snakes, vipers the size of baby dinosaurs, rats, pulsating phalanxes of ants, and a series of contests, dares, and obstacle courses right out of an Outward Bound run by al-Qaeda. Every three days at a “tribal council”—on a set that appeared to be the place where all those Tiki dolls from the 1960s went to die—someone was voted off the island. The last one left would be “the survivor” and win a million bucks. When the show premiered in May, it reeled in 15.5 million viewers. By the time of the season finale on August 23, when Richard Hatch, a.k.a. “that naked fat guy,” won, 51.7 million viewers tuned in, more than had watched the Academy Awards and 12.3 million more than the most-watched episode of the top scripted show in the country, ER.1 Even better, the show brought in viewers to CBS beyond the Polident demographic it had become known for: it lowered the median age of the network’s prime-time viewer from fifty-three to forty-eight.2 (A delicious aside: as of this writing Richard Hatch is serving four years and three months in federal prison in West Virginia for tax evasion. The judge said Hatch “lied repeatedly” on the witness stand. Yum.)3

The bumper crop era of “reality TV” had begun, and in short order we got Big Brother (summer 2001), The Amazing Race (spring 2002), The Bachelor (March 2002), The Osbournes (spring 2002), The Mole (summer 2002), Joe Millionaire (January 2003), America’s Next Top Model (May 2003), Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (August 2003), The Apprentice (January 2004), The Swan (April 2004), Laguna Beach (September 2004), My Super Sweet Sixteen (January 2005), The Hills (May 2006), and the increasingly notorious Jon & Kate Plus Eight (January 2007), to name only a fraction of the offerings. You will notice that the onslaught began in earnest after 9/11, when you might have thought the media would give us just a tad more information about the rest of the world. But what we got instead was voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and the mass sedation of brain cells. And of course there were debates and revelations about how “real” the shows really were.

But except for Fox’s universally reviled February 2000 show Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire (“slave market,” and “the great whoredom,” the press moaned), in which fifty women paraded around in bathing suits strutting their wares for a rich man they couldn’t even see and hadn’t met—all in the hopes of being chosen to marry him instantly on camera (even though, it turned out, he had restraining orders in his personal history)—there’s been precious little comment about how women have been portrayed in reality TV.

Yet a close look at reality TV reveals it to be the ground zero of enlightened sexism.

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