Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Airheads
BY JOYCE MILLMAN
(02/22/00)
I share Joyce Millman's irritation with the schizoid and incomprehensibly waffling nature of messages aimed at women through the media. A split second after the shrill, "You go, girl! Love that fat!" it can be "My GAWD, I look like a cow in this swimsuit" and the like. The only clear transmission made in this static is that women should love themselves publicly, so as to appear attractively well-adjusted; yet hate themselves privately and perpetually shop or self-mutilate in the fulfillment of this dissatisfaction.
My greatest pique about the so-called women's genres of television, magazines or books (the spooky "Bridget Jones" and Elizabeth Wurtzel, for example) is that they celebrate the inability to make choices and stick to them: "I want to eat donuts but I hate myself; I want to be accepted unconditionally but deride others for their lack of fashion sense or some other superficial concern; I want the prestige and money of an executive career but I want to stay home and pump out babies," etc. If these Svengalis of crap culture work their magic, our daughters will spend their adulthoods as willfully arrested adolescents with really big credit-card balances.
Ironically, however, the women we continue to admire the most are the ones who do make the tough calls -- the grownups who choose paths and make harrowing sacrifices in so acting. I wonder if Eleanor Roosevelt would even have endured five minutes of Oxygen programming. Odds are, she'd have had better things to do with her time, and so do we.
-- Gaby Kaplan
Thank you, thank you, thank you for blowing the whistle on Oxygen's specious brand of "woman power." My friends and I have been annoyed for months by the billboards and bus shelter ads all over New York City. I look forward to seeing that well-funded collection of big shots go through some very public birth pangs and I hope -- for their sake, anyway -- they don't go belly-up before creating some intelligent, inclusive programming. It seems these days the only market that's "underserved," as Disney/ABC Cable president Geraldine Laybourne would have it, is a demographic with intelligence, compassion and intellectual and emotional curiosity. Thanks for a great piece.
-- Stuart Cohn
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