Taking a Dim View - Part II

In Part I of this series, I mentioned how I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about many facets of the political/social scene that I don’t follow on my own. However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. In the previous essay, I focused on how many lapses occurred in the panel members’ thinking around the issue of abortion. Here I discuss how panel members fail to see the inconsistencies in their attitude toward celebrating different gender, ethnic, and social identities.

The women of The View are especially eager to demonstrate how they are in full support of the “coming out” of all those with non-conforming sexual orientations. But their philosophy of acceptance is expansive. They also assert their belief that we should all be able to demonstrate and celebrate our true selves (assuming our true selves don’t involve doing harm to others). The days of having to dissemble are over, no matter what our problems or propensities.

The View panel members give a warm welcome to individuals such as RuPaul, the flamboyant gender non-specific celebrity. They laughingly suggest that Chance the Rapper run for President, so cogent did they find his narrative songs about life in “the hood.” They have praised authors and celebrities for making public the details of their struggles with conditions such as alcoholism, addiction, cancer, HIV, and mental illness. Discussion of all these problems used to be taboo. People coping with them had to scuttle veiled through the twilight. They had to live as pariahs. But now they can come forward into the full light of day and talk openly about these aspects of their lives. They are freed to congratulate themselves on letting it all hang out without any need to gloss over any of the gritty reality of their lives. Acceptance and, above all, self-acceptance, is the order of the day.

People who have the kind of difference that might have evoked schoolyard bullying or that might once have gotten them hidden away in attics - can now come forth and parade in all their glory. This is a good thing - although I sometimes wish that people who never got addicted in the first place might be applauded as heartily as those who beat their addictions. Still, I’m glad to join in, to get in the spirit of appreciating the world in all its diversity. We should all be unabashed, able to celebrate the way we’ve come, the different paths we’ve taken in life (again assuming we’re not committed to trampling over others in the process). The women of The View are right to be waving from the floats of these new festivals of self-regard.

Except, except - a glaring hypocrisy rears its head at the end of many of their shows. At least once a week, The View concludes with a “View Your Deal” segment featuring sales on all sorts of accessories such as cosmetics. As the designated panel member enthuses over the lipstick, the mascara, and the wrinkle-erase products in the latter category, it seems to me she betrays all the principles she might have been espousing just moments before. “Oh, that’s what I need!” she’ll purr over some touch-up product that claims to hide your gray hairs, or temporarily suppress those bags under your eyes, or add the kind of glow to your cheeks that your body no longer naturally produces.

Other shows are also notable for contradicting in the second half of their programs all the reassurances they had issued in the first half. Dr. Phil might finish counseling a woman who had feelings of worthlessness instilled in her by constantly belittling parents. Dr. Phil will again stump for the philosophy that we should all reach a point where we let the negative opinions of others roll off our backs. We should instead recognize what makes us of unique value in the world and we should make our lives about contributing those unique gifts. We shouldn’t waste time remaking ourselves in attempts to satisfy other people’s half-baked judgments.

After this ringing encouragement to be true to ourselves - segue to Robin McGraw and a tray full of her new line of Revelation cosmetics wheeled onstage. Dr. Phil’s wife comes out aggressively promoting these products, perhaps even using the woman from the first part of the show to illustrate the transformations that the Revelation skin care brand can create. Robin will daub foundation, skin toner, and a variety of other camouflaging substances on the woman’s face, telling her how much younger and more refreshed she’ll look with the use of these products. “And we all feel so much more confident when we are looking our best,” Robin will soft pedal her hard sell. (By “best,” Robin of course means “different.”)

Sometimes the contradiction gets even more startling. I’m struck by the many about-faces that have occurred on Oprah’s shows. Oprah might spend the first part of a program talking with an anorexic girl and a counselor. They will agree that part of the cause of this kind of body dysmorphic disorder is often that the sufferer has been raised with an emphasis on perfection. The girl learns to push herself to achieve at levels that can’t be sustained. When she fails, she compensates by losing weight, something that she can continue to control. While one can’t always come in first at a track meet, one can always lose another half-pound by starving oneself or by throwing up.

Then Oprah will also cite how out society’s obsession with being slim contributes to the anorexia epidemic. Women especially have a lot of pressure put on them to have the bodies of slim, athletic teenagers throughout their lives. Fat girls are “dogs” who don’t get dates. Fat women are overlooked altogether. Thinness is sexually fetishized in this society. Oprah always chimes in her disapproval of this attitude. She leads audiences to believe that she might champion a fight against this kind of attitude that puts such emphasis on being girlishly skinny.

Yet throughout her career, Oprah has been preoccupied with dieting! She has come out with diet foods, diet regimens – diet, diet, diet. Then when diets don’t work, Oprah goes to extreme lengths to make herself look artificially thinner. The pictures of her that appear on the cover of each month of her O Magazine are usually heavily photoshopped or airbrushed. In addition, Oprah is girdled to the hilt, giving evidence of routinely going through an even more painful process than Scarlett O’Hara did as her maid cinched her corset in an attempt to achieve the 18-inch waist she had before giving birth. Where not even airbrushing or girdling can do the trick, headline blurbs are judiciously placed to hide any remaining bulges on Oprah’s picture. Every cover of O Magazine, every one of Oprah’s important public appearances, is a masterpiece of topiary art with Oprah being pruned, staked, and contorted into an artificial shape.

But her shows often have contained a further betrayal of her philosophy of “Eat, Pray, Love” – of “Celebrate the Real You.” After the segment on anorexia is wrapped up, Oprah sometimes will parade the results of the makeovers to which she treated some members of her audience. Formerly distinctive-looking, workaday women (usually women) will be brought out, now all dolled up into fashion uniformity, now sometimes teetering a bit in high heels.

Incidentally, Oprah herself once inadvertently acknowledged how anti-feminist and handicapping such heels can be. When one of her celebrity guests admitted that she couldn’t walk from the wings to the stage in such heels and only put them on once she was seated on stage and the camera was ready to roll - Oprah exulted that she could do better. With jolly triumph, Oprah said, “I can walk on stage. I wasn’t always sure I could do it, but I make it!” It’s hard to see how women are being liberated when they regard it as a supreme achievement to be able to walk a few yards in the requisite stiletto heels. Meanwhile, we wonder at and deplore how the Chinese upper class used to bind women’s feet in order to keep them to sexually appealing baby-steps.

At any rate, Oprah’s made-over audience members now stand on stage posing in their new get-ups. The audience members gasp in approval. Everyone applauds. The women no longer look their age, their weight, or their experience. All those distinguishing features have been concealed. The women have been cinched, pinched, and painted. They’ve been re-branded, re-fashioned into new identities.

So, what are we to conclude from all this? We conclude that it’s good to celebrate yourself if you’re gay, ghetto, struggling with mental illness, addiction, or myriads of other problems. In all such cases, you are invited to come out and shout.

BUT – if you are not what’s considered attractive (especially if you’re a woman), or if you are over 30 (especially if you’re a woman) – then it’s not okay to celebrate yourself as you are. Rather, in those cases, its incumbent upon you to spend your days glossing it over, hiding it, disguising it, lying about it, denying it. You must make yourself up and make yourself over. And if you don’t - you should be ashamed of yourself!

Taking a Dim View - How the Women of The View Get It Wrong - Part I

I make a point of watching The View as often as possible. The women are well-informed about Who’s Who in Washington. They follow the devious paths of Washington officials in a way that I’d never have been able to track myself. The women also dish on aspects of popular culture and celebrity scandal that likely touch on personal issues affecting many viewers.

However, the women consistently demonstrate blind spots in their discussions. Often, these blind spots are the result of their unquestioning acceptance of prevailing political philosophy, or of their partially unconscious acceptance of the current dictates of political correctness. These lapses in the women’s conversation often leave me with a trailing sadness. There’s so much more that could be said, that should be said – but that now gets smothered in the fog of political cliché.

The women of The View aren’t the only ones who suffer from tunnel vision. Oprah and her guests, and in fact the casts of most talk shows are almost all similarly limited. But The View provides the handiest current example of shallow political platitude.

In the following essay I point out one of the issues that leave the women blank on a number of points. That’s the issue of abortion. I’ll follow with a couple of other essays dealing with other issues where I feel something significant gets left out of their considerations. In all these instances, I wish the women of The View had taken a larger view.

In discussing abortion rights, a majority of the panel felt that women owned their bodies and should therefore have complete say over what to do with those bodies. These panel members believed that laws restricting women’s right to have abortions were patent sexism, the kind of gender bias that gets directed solely against women. One member of the panel posed the question, “Can you think of any instance in U.S. history in which legislation was passed dictating what MEN should do with their bodies?” The women looked at each other, for once silenced and stumped in unison. No one could think of any legislation that had ever affected men’s rights over their bodies, especially over their reproductive rights.

Well, one could get technical and say that almost all laws dictate what men and women can do with their bodies. For example, the most basic laws against committing murder dictate that you cannot hold a loaded gun in your hand, extend your arm, point the gun at some unsuspecting person’s back, and intentionally flex your fingers in such a way that you pull the trigger of the gun. But I know that’s not what the women meant.

However, even when one sticks to the spirit of the question the women were asking, their inability to come up with a single example of men being told what to do with their bodies shows some real lacunae in their knowledge and thinking.

There have been very specific laws passed that included men in their specifications regarding reproductive rights. The notorious sterilization laws that many States enacted in the early part of the 1900’s, and that were sometimes enforced through the 1970’s and 1980’s, certainly represent an interference with both men’s and women’s control over their own bodies.

These laws were enacted as the result of a nation-wide (and indeed world-wide) enthusiasm for the principles of eugenics. Following in the wake of the “survival of the fittest” interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, many eugenics societies formed to advocate compulsory sterilization of the feeble-minded, the criminally inclined, the chronically ill, the chronically shiftless and unemployed, and also of unwanted immigrants as well as of unwanted aboriginals. Wikipedia presents a good summary of the history of “Eugenics in the United States.” There it tells how:

“In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead… The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v Bell, upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.”

Even so generally humanist a jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes supported the Virginia sterilization law, famously asserting “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” And so Carrie Buck was sterilized.

One can see the irony of these shifting attitudes towards abortion. The eugenics laws were aimed at preventing births (through enforced sterilizations and abortions), while modern laws are tending to require all pregnant women to give birth. Autre temps, autre moeurs.

Enthusiasm for the eugenics laws waned somewhat in the U.S. in the 1940s when people became aware that the principles behind eugenics had been central to Nazi philosophy and lay at the base of the extermination of six million people. However, Buck v Bell has never been overturned, and instances of enforced sterilizations continued until quite recently.

It’s true that many more women than men were sterilized under these laws. Some of this was due to raw sexism. It stemmed from a Jack the Ripper-style abhorrence of “promiscuous women” and a barely concealed intent to punish them. But also, the fact that more women were sterilized than men often had to do with simple calculations of population control. It’s women’s fertility that is the determining factor in how many babies will be born.

Nevertheless, of the 64,000+ individuals forced to be sterilized or sterilized without sufficiently informed consent - at least several thousand were men. And in theory, the laws were generally written to apply to men and women equally. This is a significant chapter in American history that the women of The View seemed strangely ignorant of when they couldn’t think of a single instance when laws were enacted impinging on men’s control over their bodies and their ability to procreate.

There was a still larger blind spot in the women’s overview of American history though. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the question on every young man’s mind was whether or not his “number would be called.” Almost every young man was on tenterhooks. Would he be drafted to go to Viet Nam? Would he be required to expose himself to being maimed or killed in a foreign jungle? I would call any draft a very definite legislative impingement on men’s ability to do what they wanted with their bodies. How could The View women forget about that?

Getting back to the question of how strict anti-abortion laws unequally oppress women though – The View panel consistently fails to consider the obverse of that point. In virtually all countries that have more liberal abortion laws, that is, in countries that allow abortions under a wide range of circumstances – the fetuses that get disproportionately aborted are female fetuses. There is still a virtually universal preference for male babies. The result of the “one couple, one baby” policy that prevailed in China has been widely publicized. When a woman gave birth to a female child, that child was often put up for adoption, or, more brutally, was left to die by the roadside or was covertly killed outright at the moment she appeared. Ahem, another still birth, miscarriage, etc. These erasures allowed couples to try again and hope for the better luck of a male child the next time.

As it became possible to more readily determine the sex of a baby in utero, it was overwhelmingly females who were aborted. But that is true even in Western countries that are considered to be past such obvious sexism. Doctors in Britain report that when, after an ultra-sound, a woman requests an abortion – it is more often than not a female who gets aborted.

So in a way that the women of The View don’t probe deeply enough to consider – it’s a no-win situation for women. If most abortions are outlawed, women are forced to have children they neither want nor can afford. But if abortions are readily available, it’s disproportionately females who are denied life.

There are still a few other crucial points that are rarely taken into account as talk show panel members ping-pong the same old clichés about abortion – women’s rights; the right to life; women’s rights; the right to life…. I discussed one of these other ignored aspects of the debate in my previous Blog post entitled “The False Premise of the Abortion Debate.” The point of that essay was that while many are insisting on women’s right to have abortions, they neglect to consider ways in which women might be given the precedent right not to have sex. In that previous Blog, I maintained that most women usually don’t feel such a compelling urge to have sex, that they must have it NOW, no matter what the consequences.

Contrary to the way in which women are portrayed in the movies, most often women are not so urgently desirous that they have to rip off their partner’s clothes as soon as they get in the door. This is a far bigger misrepresentation of women’s true feelings than the often-cited Victorian assumption that women were naturally reticent. The truth is that women most often have sex only in order to accommodate men’s urgency. A woman has sex in hopes of “keeping” her man, of bonding him to her so that deeper feelings might have time to flourish. If women had their way, if they had just their own wishes to consider - they would tend to have sex only if and when they were ready to accept that a child might be the result. However, as a practical matter, women aren’t given that right to say “NO” to sex, and few people are currently working to give them, not so much that right, but that ability, in the course of ordinary romantic relationships.

Then there is still another aspect of the abortion debate that the women of The View fail to consider. Most “Right to Choose” advocates talk about how women should be allowed to “own their bodies.” But this idea of ownership is disturbing. In most modern liberal contexts, ownership has come to have some negative connotations. It’s usually supposed that one can only rightly own a thing, not a person. What made slavery especially abhorrent was that it necessarily made things out of the actual human beings who were being bought, sold, and owned. It reduced human beings to mere items of inventory.

If one considers that ownership can only be exercised on a “thing,” it doesn’t matter whether you are talking about owning other people – or yourself. Both should be seen as equally repugnant.

Many individuals are now calling for reconsidering that usage even as it applies to animals, plants, and all the earth’s resources. The rise of factory farming makes it especially apparent how depreciating the concept of ownership can be. Creatures who should rightfully be treated with respect, with an awareness of and a sense of awe at the singular, miraculous life force that fills them – are instead brutalized and considered only as commodities under the farm’s regime of ownership.

Those who are fighting for reform of the factory farm system often point to the traditional Native American philosophy as an example of how life and all of earth’s resources should be regarded. Native Americans did not strictly apply the concept of ownership to the animals they hunted for food, or to the land’s bounty in general. White people’s attempts to enforce the concept of private ownership on them were perhaps responsible, more than any other depredations, for disorienting and dispiriting the Native American population. The modern idea that each individual should own himself or herself would have been even more profoundly alienating to Native Americans.

But aside from this broadly problematic application of the term “ownership,” it should also be remembered that ownership doesn’t mean one can do exactly as one wishes with one’s property. The “Right to Choose” faction of the abortion debate seems to imply that by granting women the right to claim ownership over their own bodies, the women can be granted total freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. But ownership almost never grants any such carte blanche. Indeed, ownership of something usually carries with it a heavy burden of responsibility, restriction, and broad conservatorship. The owner of an apartment building can’t deny African Americans the right to rent there based on their race; the owner of a chemical factory can’t dump toxic waste, even on company property. Just because you own something doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it – and that includes your own body.

There’s one further aspect of the idea that each of us owns our bodies that actually flies against enlightened philosophy. Such a concept of ownership evokes the old Cartesian dualism that modern science has larger discredited. By saying “I own my body,” you imply that there are two separate entities involved in your personhood. There is an immaterial mind controlling a material corpus. There is the owner and the owned inhabiting you. Who is this owner, the one who assumes such haughty proprietorial rights?

Contrary to the idea that there is such a schism constituting each of us, now most science falls on the side of there being only one unified entity comprising each of us, and that entity is an interactive physical network. The processes that give rise to all thoughts, including thoughts each person has about his or her own identity - are chemical, electrical processes at work in a real, material substrate. The person and the thought are one. We are all both indivisibly the singer and the song.

It’s true that these metaphysical considerations might seem to be a bit rarified for daytime TV. Talk shows are meant to be entertaining as well as informative. But the women of The View do audiences a disservice by ignoring these aspects of the abortion debate altogether. The truth is – men have been legally denied control over reproductive capacity and over their lives as a whole. Ready access to abortions can work against the interests of females. Pregnancies are more the result of men’s urgency than of women’s real desires, with the latter being subordinated once again. By trapping women into adopting the idea of a robber baron’s right of ownership - they are being trapped into a limiting falsehood.

This is just one of the issues on which talk shows fall short of taking a larger view. In a couple of follow-up essays, I’ll cite other ways in which I wish talk shows would step outside the box of the usual political cliché and open the discussion to wider, wilder fields of thought.