78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Reality? TV?
2003-04-29   5:32 p.m.

Thoughts are absolutely flying through my head today. I keep sectioning off my day, my life, my body, almost - hands are for grading, head is for planning, mouth is for making wedding arrangements related phone calls; blah. I'm sick of it.

I am getting my oil changed. I promise.

Poor Franka needs a shout out, or big ups, or whatever it is that helps you out and cheers you up. People can be mean sometimes. I'd take her out for coffee, only she's across the country.

So yesterday, Steve and I were watching - in this order - that Diva thing on VH1, the last bits of the movie The Hand That Rocked the Cradle, and that road rules/real world gender challenge thing on MTV. I find myself paying more and more attention to the stuff my students watch and talk about during class, and something really interesting happened on the MTV show.

The girls' team, apparently after a huge losing streak, were having a group meeting and talking about how unfair the games or "challenges" were. I got all excited until one of the girls said "If these competitions involved manicures, we'd be all over that. But instead we're supposed to climb up poles and jump into nets." Of course that disappointed me, but then before bed I thought about what she said.

Maybe, like my students, she just didn't have the words to articulate what was really going on, or the vocabulary of theory behind her complaint. I watched some more of the episodes today - thanks to MTV's repetitive and ad nauseum programming schedule - and realized that she had a very valid point. We raise girls not to play tough or hard. We condition them to think that they can't be a worthy or legitimate comeptitor when it comes to "manly" things like sports. I looked at who the most successful competitor was on the girls' team - a lesbian. Someone who obviously has to shirk stereotypes and deal with bullshit from ignorant people on a daily basis. She has probably had to learn, because of her lifestyle, how to protect her esteem and survive despite people's attempts to oppress, dismiss, or criticize her. Did she develop a coping mechanism going through her life as a lesbian that allowed her to rise above her self-doubt? Is that what's helping her be successful now? All of the other women on the team look just as physically fit as this most successful one. So why do they make up their minds before they even start the competition that they're going to fail? Why do they fall into the "but I'm a girl" default?

A case in point, to those of you who might be shaking your heads: In a study done on classroom behavior among middle-school children, Peggy Ornstein (Her book is called School Girls) noticed that boys will raise their hands even if they don't know the answer. Before the teacher is even done asking the question, she pointed out, boys hands will shoot up. When called on, they'll use verbal stalling tactics until they can pull together what they're going to say ("um...um...um...", etc.). Girls, on the other hand, won't raise their hands unless they've secured an answer first, hence their hesitancy. In fact, in the one classroom she was observing, the girls would only raise their hands after many of the boys were called on, but then only could stutter "um...I forgot...what was the question?"

By no means am I presenting this as a competition or evaluation of middle-school children's intelligence level. It's the self-esteem factor that's so interesting in Orstein's study, that boys somehow are taught to be fearless, while girls are not. I think this is something we often don't account for when we have these "battle of the sexes" presentations by mass media. What we wind up when the women's team keeps failing on this MTV show are false positives which people will use as justification for the propagation of stereotypes or gender bias.

I wish that woman could have called it like it is. She noticed something was wrong, that's a start, but then fell into stereotyping because perhaps that's the only language she can use to express herself. She FEELS the competition is unfair, but has never been TAUGHT that she's allowed to evaluate the situation on a more systematic level.

Shame on MTV for presenting us with this competition - dividing up groups by gender, leading us to believe that this is a fair and just method with which to evaluate who is "stronger".

Shows like this present a false message, too - that just because the girls are there, that it's an equal competition. Yet it's more ammo, when the girls fail, for people to say that they don't belong there in the first place. We don't think that there could be a cultural or conditional reason for their failure. Instead, we turn it into biology, nature, essentialism. Pukey pukey.

More cultural criticism, courtesy of me,

Theresa

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