As I See It / April 2007
Down the Tube
Television may be a window to the world, but there are flaws in the glass making the view as grotesque as a fun house mirror. Network television has found a formula that must be working for someone, but for a woman viewer, is at best offensive, but at worst, and that is most of the time, deeply disturbing.
Has murdering women replaced baseball as America’s favorite past time? How many close-ups of bloody, beaten women are enough in one week? How many story lines of mutilation and gross perversion are still to be explored? Who decided that the terror of women is what viewers crave? How much more gruesome can the images be?
Every night, in show after show, the beautiful, carved bodies are displayed and positioned in the sharpest focus, with maximum skin, and loving close ups of the parts to interest peepers. And they are beautiful. Apparently, plain or pudgy women don’t get murdered, or raped, or stalked. And woman are only killed in short skirts that obligingly reveal designer panties and lots of leg. The quantity of dead women is overwhelming. The quality, perhaps, is not surprising. Only in British television are ordinary women considered worthy of screen time.
But, television has had its consciousness raised. It isn’t just prostitutes that are brutally beaten, left in dumpsters, and buried in shallow ditches, though considering the sheer numbers of prostitutes that are killed in an average season, there must only be a handful of practitioners left. Now, though, professional women are targeted just as freely.
But here’s the message repeated with every bloodied body: A women can study, work, grow and dream. She can become something great, something important, something wonderful. But, no matter what she does or who she is or how strong she is or what she contributes, she cannot protect herself.
She is never safe.
At any time, at any moment, her life can be extinguished with no more regard than the swatting of a fly.
The fetish killers of CSI Las Vegas, the shallow but buff killers of CSI Miami, the oddballs and eccentrics of CSI New York, the serial killers of Criminal Minds, any of them can take out a woman without a second thought. And they do, every week, every night.
The stories just get sleazier and cheesier. Can that many people be doing-and dying from–auto asphyxiation? Is black rubber comfortable? Each week brings some new bizarre substance to be shared, snorted or licked off, usually by people who look like they wouldn’t even drink milk after the sell-by date.
The psychopaths get weirder, odder and angrier. But what is truly terrifying is how the networks show women being humiliated, in words or deeds, at work, at home, by husbands and boyfriends and bosses. And then, of course, the women die.
Network television has managed to reach something lower than the common denominator.
Depravity with some kind of redemption might not be so objectionable. Illuminating the underside of human nature is an acceptable concept, a common literary device, even a necessary step in psychological awareness. But the diffuse, mindless depravity fueling prime time crime dramas simply suck out the soul. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just a dark, dreary, overwhelmingly depressing tunnel.
The crime shows also provide the most offensive dismissal and objectification of women, with police women showing cleavage, scientists in four inch heels, lawyers in sprayed on skirts. But the reality shows are just as disheartening. On every channel, there are ugly people doing ugly things to each other.
Ever the equal opportunists, on television, the script calls for women to act just as reprehensibly, just as contemptibly as their male counterparts.
For years, television showed a world that wasn’t real, where women vacuumed in pearls, cooked dinner every night and never left the house. That view was flawed as well. But the women didn’t die, they weren’t shown being beaten and they weren’t debased, even during sweeps week.
Our window to the world needs a good spring cleaning.
Copyright © 2007 A Woman's View. All rights reserved.
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