Culture – Page 23

A Big Fat Profitable Meme

Published on May 31, 2007

It’s serendipitous that this admittedly ‘well duh’ set of research results should pop up this week while the issue of singers’ weight is a big online topic: :

Ubiquitous pop videos may harm girls’ self-image

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday May 31, 2007
The Guardian

Music videos are driving a wave of dissatisfaction among adolescent girls by promoting ultra-thin role models as the epitome of beauty, psychologists warn today.

Watching pop videos featuring thin, scantily clad women for just 10 minutes was enough to drive down girls’ satisfaction with their body shape, according to a study which appears in the journal Body Image.

Researchers fear the damage inflicted on the self-image of girls as they prepare to leave schools and sixth form colleges is widespread, given the near ubiquity of music videos on television and on big screens in clothes shops, cafes and bars.

Viewing figures for MTV have swelled to 342m worldwide, according the channel, and a survey in 1998 found that 12- to 19-year-olds were the most frequent viewers, watching on average for 6.4 hours a week.

But Helga Dittmar, a psychologist at Sussex University and leader of the latest study, said adolescents were likely to spend far more time watching music videos than the survey suggested. “Public places such as stores, bars and clubs increasingly display music videos on large TV screens, making them an inescapable, almost omnipresent form of media,” she said.

More….

Indeed they are omnipresent, even here in Amsterdam, which does at least keep a lid on the more blatant forms of public advertising; though we are forrced to watch ads on the trams, they’re not really of the music video type; more for sore arse ointment or real- estate agents.

But there are few fashion chainstores you can go into without an in your face dose of Christina, Pussycat Dolls or some identikit skeleton with inflated boobs, fake cheekbones, extensions and a spray-on tan gyrating over some German techno-trance monotony and there’s about to be an explosion of it all over, now that the Netherlands premier department store De Bijenkorf is getting in on the act.

“Introducing in-store television is a move towards the store of the future. It can be compared to the Internet 15 years ago, when not many people were exploiting it for commercial use. One of the really attractive features is the ability to develop our own content and programming.

“This means that we can produce content that is very specific to our needs and can be immediately tailored to reflect exactly our central and local marketing priorities.

“In fact, the ability to tailor content to reflect in-store initiatives, trends and promotions is central to the screens’ success.”

If you’re a teenager and want to keep up with your peers you can’t avoid it. I thought it was bad when I was young but the pressure teenagers are under now is horrendous, schoolgirls saving up from Saturday jobs for liposuction and so on.

Despite stating the bleeding obvious it’s still quite a timely report, considering the current furore about the perfectly normal, if tall (but then anyone is tall to me, being barely over five foot in a land of dairy-fed giants) winner of the latest US Pop Idol.

Some publicity-hungry suburban country club nonentity and one-member manufactured ‘pressure group’ that Fox picked up somewhere called Meme Roth called her ‘obese’. Obese. Really. Give me a break and get back to your obsessive jazzercise and mainlining aragula salad and ogling poolboys, you silly, silly woman. And ‘Meme’? What were her parents thinking? Let’s face it, when your name constantly reiterates your existence -‘me,me,me,me,me..’ – you’re bound to turn out a solipsistic narcissist.

But enjoyable cattiness aside, Ms Roth’s just another tool being used to create a sensation and push up Fox’s profile.

It’s Fox pushing this meme and Meme too. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it’s a company that has much invested in media worldwide, not just the US. It promotes music videos, it makes money from them. Of course they want to influence them. To think otheriwse is to mistake the purpose of a corporation, which is to make money.

To us it’s about more than mere vanity and fashion; it’s about whether we can look in the mirror and loathe or accept ourselves for what we are.

To them it’s just about making a market. Handily it also gives a nice lot of traffic to other mass media outlets too, who profess outrage but who are still happily counting the hits. Their ad revenue goes up as well and everyone’s happy, excpet the girls and women who are left wondering why it is they don’t look ‘normal’.

Weight is a hot-button issue for almost all westernised women and there’s lots of ways to make money from that. Again we’ve fallen into the corporate trap and they’ve created a controversy to frame the discussion andmake money out of it. They got us going and coming. No wonder we hate ourselves.

De Haut En Bas

Published on May 30, 20072 Comments

Is it just me, or does this read as horribly condescending?

Kactus, one of my super-favorite babymama blog crushes who needs a wider audience, has chronicled her experiences using food stamps for the last five weeks (although I think I lost week 4): Week One, Week One Part II, Week One Part III, The Meat Deal Is A Big Deal, Week Three: The Month So Far, Week Five.

I do urge you to read the posts despite the twee intro: everyone should know exactly how it is many of us survive these days and not only that, learn how to do it themselves. The good times won’t last forever, and poverty isn’t a moral fault, it’s just shitty circumstances. This whole ‘you are poor you must have brought it on yourself’ schtick is a crock of shit designed to assuage others’ greed and guilt.

There but for sheer blind good fortune go you, no matter how much you might like to tell yourself it’s all your own talent, charm and all-round coolness. No-one is secure: even if you’re in an open-ended salaried job with benefits and no dependents, you’re still likely to be only a couple of month’s salary or a major illness away from penury. But with a job of the uncertain, badly paid type that are available these days and dependents, you’re fucked – unless you’re a very, very clever manager, which Kaktus obviously is, as well as being a talented writer. The fact that she finds time to write at all is a bloody miracle. What she’s doing is feminism in the raw and I know because I’ve done it too.

So to describe Superbabymama not as a fellow grown woman and a writer but as a “super-favorite babymama blog crush” – well, to me it gives off an air of magnolias; but then maybe I have a sensitive nose. But I still can’t help but be reminded of Reese Witherspoon in full on “aren’t I cute while being so sweet to the help’ mode.

But like I said, maybe it’s just me. I’m English and class skirmishes make my atennnae go up.

Off You Twitter, Twitter

Published on May 25, 2007

My brief experiment with Twitter (the latest craze according to Lifehack, so it must be true) is over: I didn’t feel it added anything whatsoever to the blog. Half the time it was down for maintenance or upgrading and all it did anyway was remind me how dull I am. I was almost tempted to invent stuff just to jazz it up a liitle, but the character number limitation didn’t give much scope. No, be honest, that’s not quite true – I just really couldn’t be arsed. Or maybe it was actually because no-one ever looked at it and I had no friends and it made me feel horribly inadequate? Yup that’s probably it. But whatever, bye-bye Twitter, it’s been real.

Dr Laura Psycho Hellspawn Watch Update Thing

Published on May 22, 200718 Comments

It turns out that serving soldier and notoriously violent MySpace user Deryk Schlessinger, son of radio personality Dr Laura Schlessinger, was also the GOP goon who kicked a young woman in the head at the 2004 Republican convention.

Republic of T has the video and more..

Can’t wait for the next revelation. It’s almost as good entertainment as Dynasty until you remember Schlessinger’s violence is real.

“I Am My Child’s Mom”

Published on May 21, 200753 Comments

Or, ‘Raising Hell, The Dr Laura Way”.

It seems Dr Laura Schlessinger, scourge of the morally lax parent, may herself have raised a sociopath. Oh, how I love the smell of hung petards in the morning….

First a little backstory, for non-Usanians like me who may not be that familiar with ‘Dr Laura’, the bizarro-Oprah of talk radio. Dr Laura Schlessinger is a rightwing radio ‘therapist’, wannabe tv star and self-help book author, whose fans absolutely lap up her harsh strictures on sexuality, relationships and child-rearing.

Her show’s syndicated on Clear Channel radio US-wide; Clear Channel, part-owned by Mormon presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital (which has all kinds of interesting connections with some decidedly neofascist types) has a history of manufacturing and broadcasting far-right reactionary radio ‘personalities’.

So far, so usual for the US rightwing media machine and its creatures.- but Dr Laura is special. First off she’s a doctor, of sorts; even though it’s a Phd. in physiology not pychology it authenticates her very subjective advice as somehow quasi-medical and so iher personal emotional hangups’re adopted as sound principles by her rightwing supporters, some of whom are so loyal to her personally that they describe themselves as ‘Dr Laura’s Army’.

Dr Laura fits the Clear Channel mould perfectly; she’s a cruel homophobe and a hypocrite with a shady past (by her own stated standards) who preaches to others what she does not practice herself. She’s a vicious piece of work with it, as I’ve discovered the more I’ve read:

Even more shocking was her treatment of a Connecticut eighth-grader for an award-wining essay on free speech on the Internet. Attacking the girl by name, she maliciously asserted: “If she was my daughter, I’d probably put her up for adoption. . . .When she makes her marriage vows, and her husband has sex with someone else, let’s see if she thinks that this philosophy works. She also suggested that the girl be “sacrificed,” Inca style!

Someone who could treat a child that way should never be allowed near one in a therapeutic or a parental sense, IMHO. Who knows how many children’s lives she’s affected with her self-interested, twisted ideas? Well, one at least has been severely affected according to this report, and having found out what unpleasant child-rearing ideas his mother has it comes as no surprise – in fact it almost seems inevitable.

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page
Site contained violent, sex-oriented images one official called ‘repulsive’
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 05/19/2007 12:15:45 AM MDT

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura. Broadcast locally on 570 KNRS, “Family Values Talk Radio,” the former family counselor spends three hours daily taking calls and offering advice on morals, ethics and values. She broadcast a show from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, last week.

[…]

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Dr. Laura’s publicity people and the US Army are now trying to suggest that this site was created by mysterious ‘enemies’ engaged in ‘information warfare’. Uh, huh, right, yeah, because Al-Qaeda or the Mahdi army have got nothing better to do than to fuck around creating fake MySpace pages about the batshit crazy sons of psychotic wingnut radio personalities.

After the Salt Lake City Tribune published this report ‘Dr Laura’s Army’ leapt to her defence in the papers’ pages, bombarding it with oddly similar emails, the overall tone of which was ‘don’t blame her for the decisions her child makes’. Bollocks to that, she doesn’t get off that easy – particularly since a major part of her schtick appears to be telling parents that they are indeed responsible for their child’s behaviour. Her catchphrase is even “I am my kid’s mom,”, FFS.

Dr Laura was once asked a very pertinent question a while back about the kind of behaviour her own son is apparently exhibiting , by CNN’s Larry King:

KING: And then how do you explain those where you had parents that drifted and the kid turned out terrific, and other places where the parents did all the things you said to do and he turns into a serial killer and everyone on the block is shocked?

SCHLESSINGER: When we take the fringe of the bell curve of exceptions and try to make them speak for the rule we’re not being fair. We’re taking extremes to try to get away from a truth that we know morally, intuitively we know what we need to do. I think human beings — I mean, from the time we’re born we have the ability to be selfish, we have the ability to be selfless. But I think small creatures are basically selfish, and we always have to strive against our selfishness every day in every way.

Shorter Dr Laura – “I don’t know what makes psychos. Ask me another”.

But she did know the answer all along.

Laura Schlessinger’s appearance in Utah last week included a visit with Army families at Fort Douglas. In an interview with The Tribune, she said, “We raised our son to be a warrior.”

Now see, there’s the problem right there. This is the kind of ‘warrior’ he became under Dr Laura’s tender care – at least according to what may admittedly beunreliable sources, ie someone who says they were at at school with Schlessinger Jr.:

I was in school with Derek in fourth and fifth grade. He was a sadistic bully then. He was a terribly unhappy kid who boasted about all the money his mom made and threatened, bullied, and beat up younger kids.If a teacher tried to discipline him or in any way thwart him he would threaten that his mom would get them fired and would sue them. I don’t know if she could but I know it scared a lot of teachers I don’t know a kid in school who was sorry to see him go when his mom put him in private school. We used to call him Malfoy because he reminded us of the character from Harry Potter. I wouldn’t be amazed by anything the guy is assused of, up to homicide. He is a nasty piece of work.
May 19th, 2007 at 19:09:49
From: KEN KORNFELD

Now, Schlessinger Jr. has been serving in special forces, and there might be those who’ll say PTSD! but that’s a copout. Special Forces are the soldiers who did this. This typifies what’s on young Deryk’s MySpace page:

In one of the stick drawings, a top-hatted man laughs as he rapes a bound and bleeding woman in front of her family. In another depiction, a man forces a boy to perform oral sex at knifepoint as the child’s mother pleads for her son’s life.

No doubt Dr Laura herself will be one of those who scream “PTSD!” too, supporting her little ‘warrior’ and his pyschotic tendencies to the end. But there’s no evading her responsibility: as she’s said herself –

SCHLESSINGER: …men are born of women, they are trained by women, they date marry that are trained by women, they marry women they are trained by women. A lot of what women get from men is their own doing, and that’s why I wrote this book because we primarily have the control in the relationships of the quality of the relationships.

How does that petard feel, Dr Laura? A little uncomfortable, perhaps?