Today I was at work, and my bosses daughter turned on MTV. “Making the Band” was on. I’ve never seen it, but for whatever reason I’m a sucker for bad reality TV.
I’m not sure how it works, but from what I gather a bunch of hopeful young singers are put together in a house, and then are kicked out progressively until there are only enough to make a band- which then tries to go on to fortunes or something.
Anyway.
When I was a teenager, I read “The Beauty Myth” and was as shrill as anyone else. Then I grew up and realized I liked porn, women don’t all fall for this crap, and there are bigger fish to fry. Since them I’ve kind of stopped worrying about gender and power as portrayed in the media. Sure- it can be fun to analyze a movie on a Saturday night, but I don’t believe that a few scenes of violence or some naked women are the foundation for all that is fucked up in our world.
But “Making the Band” is something that is fucked up in our world.
To begin with, all the singers are very very young girls. I’m a bad judge of age, but none of them looked over eighteen to me. They all look like kids putting on too much makeup and trying on their mom’s heels. Maybe it is just their skinnyness that makes them look so young. But we arn’t talking about a house full of self-assured twenty-somethings here.
And all these girls are trying to do one thing- please the bevy of tough talking guys that control their fates. They have a very theatrical overweight guy that lives with them, and controls every aspect of their life- from if they get to use the phone to what they can eat. They have record producers and voice coaches and all manner of people judgeing them every moment- quite publically- and all they have is hopes and barely pubescent bodies to please them with.
Which maybe wouldn’t be so bad, except for the injections of “reality TV drama” that you can expect. On survivor it’s one thing, but in a show about young ladies being as sexy as possible and trying to please every man they meet- men who hold power over everything they care about and are paid to give them a hard time- it gets hard to watch.
In the episode I watched, the overweight guy threw away all their food with carbs- saying they were all going on a diet. One girl said “But I weight 95 pounds!” This segmented ended in an exhasted bedroom wrap up, where the tensions mount among the exhausted, starving girls (one said all she ate was a slice of cheese and a grape that day.) We are supposed to think that seeing these hungry girls go nuts from not having enough food because some guy took it away to make them sexier is entertaining.
I rarely think “what about the children?”, but really, I was watching this with a fourteen year old. What is she learning about feminine power? What is she learning about how to suceed? What is she learning about health and her body?
Everyone in the show constantly insults, harrangues, isolates, and degrades each girl as often as possible. The idea is to see who breaks, because that is where the drama lies. They also build fault lines between the girls, to make for more fun catfights.
I just couldn’t help but get so sad for these girls who are being exploited in every way possible and having their young dreams purposefully bashed and destroyed in tears for our enjoyment. The big drama comes from watching them fight, watching them break down, watching them fail, and watching the winners lap up the spoils. It’s one thing when it’s among a bunch of equals on Survivor, but another when it is a puppet show involving powerful men and eager girls.
And it’s also very clear that the show wouldn’t be all that different if a casting couch was involved. These girls want to succeed. They are learning to do anything to get that. Maybe it’s just that bedding young starlets is such a time-worn tradition…but it just doesn’t seem like grist for the reality TV mill. Now that I think about that, maybe that is why they made the guy that lives with them seem stereotypically gay- they want to back away from the insinuations they know they are making.
When I was a young girl and wanted to be a film maker, the people I know encouraged me. I knew it would be a tough path and there were people that were going to try to use me, but the people around me prepared me for that. If these girls do have some talent, they deserve more than this. If they don’t, they deserve to let their dreams die a peacefuly quiet death.