Bridalplasty: Is this really where we want to be as a society?
January 5, 2011
by Pat Bakalian
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
There is a new reality TV show called Bridalplasty. In this “Showbiz Tonight” HLN video you will see young brides competing to have plastic surgery done before they get married! While women have always been concerned with how they look, this is a new LOW!
I just finished re-reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. This was a very different time but I can see similarities with what is happening now.
In The Feminine Mystique Friedan writes:
Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor”.
…”Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 – the housewife-mother….The transformation, reflected in the pages of the women’s magazines, was sharply visible in 1949 and progressive through the 50’s.
Back then Friedan says the magazine articles were “How to Snare a Male”, “Are You Training Your Daughter to be a Wife”, and “How to Hold On to a Happy Marriage”.
We have many new mediums now, but women are essentially being sold the same bill of goods. Back then the magazines were… “less interested in ideas to reach women’s minds and hearts, than in selling them the things that interest advertisers: appliances, detergent, lipstick”.
Now Bridalplasty is saying what really matters is not who you are but what you look like.
In the “Showbiz Tonight” HLN video it was said that this is a “Refection of where we are in America.” But why do so many women in our culture believe that their physical beauty is their only, or most important, asset? How can we women stop being pawns of the billion dollar beauty industry? Is this what we want to teach our young daughters? Is this really where we want to be as a society?
I agree Pat. When I see movies with women who age naturally, I think wow, they really look elegant and beautiful. I read a while ago, there were casting issues with finding women even in their 40s who didn’t have plastic surgery.
This show is not a reflection of our culture it is a reflection of the perverse culture of the people who run media. Authentic women do not have a voice in corporate media.
Shows like this are a good reason to cancel cable TV. It would take hours a day to block all of this sort of schlock which teaches women and girls to focus on imaginary flaws rather than their strengths. Even when you block all the unwanted offensive content there are still the offensive ads. Drop the cable, invite only the shows you actually watch into your home by using the internet, Hulu and Netflix. Save a ton of money and time each month. Deny funding to this sort of crap.
Corporate Media gives voice to straight men who define women relative to them, via pornography. Media also give voice to gay men who attempt to define women through fashion via unwearable, unflattering clothing that constricts the movements of women. The ad men who define women as bags of flaws to market product to are quite loud in Corporate Media. Then we have the media women who are content to go along with the corporate program to get ahead personally. What we don’t have is women, young or old defining ourselves. I don’t think we need to shut these extremely loud purveyors of sexist schlock down, we just need to make sure they are subjected to a free media market (stop subsidizing them with our Basic Cable payment) and we need to be free to offer an alternative to their self serving idiocy.
“Is this really where we want to be as a society?”
Like everything else on this Earth, it all hinges on who’s included in the “we.”
I think we should write the creators, the surgeon and sponsors of the show to show them how disgusted we are that this is what’s being fed to our young women. There are plenty of people who really need plastic surgery.
Shanna Moakler is the host, and this is the info on the company that advertises it on it site:
“E! Online, Inc. (“E! Online”) is a wholly owned subsidiary of E! Entertainment Television, Inc. (“E!”), the world’s largest producer and distributor of entertainment news and lifestyle-related programming. E! operates E! Entertainment Television, the only television network with programming dedicated to the world of entertainment, and Style Network, dedicated to style, beauty, fashion and home design. E! is currently available to more than 80 million cable and direct broadcast satellite subscribers in the U.S., and Style Network currently counts more than 40 million subscribers.
Read more: http://www.eonline.com/about/i.....z1AC46iADg
Does anybody have a contact info for the show producers?
E! is owned by Comcast. Here is a profile of Comcast from their financial page on Yahoo. You can see they are a huge company run by men and they are about to get more huge by purchasing NBC/Universal studios.
It is a good idea to contact Comcast, and all sponsors. But it is an even better idea to stop subsidizing Comcast and their load of sexist programing by stopping your subscription to the TV Cable.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=CMCSA+Profile
I don’t intend to watch this show, but is it really promoting plastic surgery? It sounds more to me like it’s about mocking those frivolous women who choose it (a choice made in a complete cultural vacuum, of course.) Just like “Bridezillas” exists not to showcase how great weddings are, but rather to ridicule women who are enthusiastic about them.
There’s pop culture that tells us how ugly women are, and then there’s pop culture that tells us how stupid and vain women are. The first kind usually involves more benign-sounding appearance improvement methods (practice portion control! exercise! lots of water is great for your skin!) This show sounds more like the second kind.
” … is it really promoting plastic surgery? It sounds more to me like it’s about mocking those frivolous women who choose it … ”
The two go together pretty often, which is pretty sick. I think society promotes this garbage to women precisely because it needs to hold us in contempt for something. The same people who make fun of women for spending money on shoes and makeup are the ones who wouldn’t look twice at a woman without those shoes and makeup, or who wouldn’t think of going out to their mailboxes without mascara.
It is so true how much women are told what they ‘need’ to look like. Stephanie Coontz’s new book “A Strange Stirring – The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960′s” has a lot of really interesting fact and tidbits in it about that time period too. It is interesting how far women’s rights have come but at the same time they are still stuck in the past. You should check out that book if this topic interests you.
Actually it would be a good idea if people wrote to the FCC who still have to approve the Comcast/NBC merger and told them that more media mergers are a really bad idea for consumers because of the sexist corporate culture at Comcast and in media in general which results in a malecentric channel line up and the crap that they do aim at women is degrading and in fact dangerous. It is not too late to try to stop the merger or to demand something for female audiences besides this sort of garbage. Of course I am assuming that this load of crap is considered “women’s content” by the men in charge.
If it is any consolation E! has very, very few viewers, still you subsidize it with your basic cable payment.
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