Ratings Gold
AndyJo pointed me to a typically great entry at Sandy Szwarc's Junkfood Science. You've all heard of The Simple Life, right? It's one of those awesome extreme reality shows involving rich kids Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton doing blue-collar tasks. Ratings gold!
This season they're running a fat camp.
Stay with me here.
In their first episode? They give the attendees enemas. In public. As Szwarc says:
...it is more than insane to hold these underweight, troubled girls up as examples of healthy eating for young viewers to emulate. Worse, for this show to teach dangerous, unhealthful tactics to lose weight used by bulimics will cause countless numbers of already weight-conscious young kids irreparable harm.
Note that the camp attendees were of legal age (a bit of a relief, as it was originally reported that these were young girls). The only thing we can hope is that The Simple Life skulks back into a ratings black hole where it deserves to die. I can conceive almost no instance in which this could be deemed entertainment.
On top of that, Kunoichi pointed folks in the forums to Fat Kids Can't Hunt. This brilliant concept pairs fat kids with Aboriginal tribesmen to hunt for food. If they don't get food, they'll starve. Producer Bridget Sneyd:
“This experiment gives our teenagers a unique opportunity to address their dysfunctional relationship with food once and for all before they reach adulthood.â€
Yes, because humiliating kids on national television by forcing them to hunt for wild game will fix all of their food relationship issues. Yes. That will do it.
Moreover: who the hell would let their kids do stuff like this? It's maddening to think that parents are in such a position to consider these moves good ones. Anything to not be fat, I guess.
Great WashPo Piece on Fat & Fit | The Other Feminine Mistake
Posted by paul on April 22, 2007
Maybe I am just in a funk and feeling even more negative than usual, but this makes me very angry. If you took any mainstream person off the street--thin or fat--chances are they would have a difficult time having to live like an Aboriginal tribesperson. What does making it about fat kids do, other than completely cloud all the issues around the issues of weight and diet? Well, the most important thing it does, I guess, is give us an easy target for our schadenfreude. People can sit and watch and feel smug and self-righteous and enjoy the fat kid being hungry for once as well he should be, the tub o' lard. You know, because fat people should learn some discipline and stop their mindless 'round the clock stuffing of themselves, and this treatment just serves them right. I don't see how it will accomplish anything positive. It doesn't even claim to be about contrasting a modern diet with a traditional one, just helping obese kids with their "dysfunctional relationship to food." Just utterly depressing. I hope I'm wrong about it.
Things like this always make me laugh. I would LOVE to see them try and make a show where they take a gay teen and force them to go to a straight camp. Or how about one where some uneducated inner city kids go to a rich private school and see how they fit in? All sorts of groups would rise up and defend these kids from the horrible treatment they're about to receive. But Fat Frank and Plump Patty? They deserve to get poked fun of. They need to be humilitaed to see the errors of eating too much food.
I can see a program where healthy eating and exercise programs are introduced and the child isn't told that being overweight is the greatest evil in the world. I can see one if they're treated as children who have feelings. The problem is most of these "fat" shows go right in and slap a plate of cooked veggies in the kids face along with an exercise program that they're not ready for or don't even like the activity.
Make exercise fun and not a punishment and they'll do it on their own and they'll be healthy. Tell them they don't need to starve and give up every single thing they like to eat and they'll do it. You don't need to diet to be healthy and you don't need to be rail thin either.
This is just further proof that people are not grokking one very simple thing:
You cannot shame someone into doing something to change themselves.
Shame is not an effective motivator. *sigh*
How can this kind of treatment not be regarded as child abuse, let alone entertainment? If a parent gave their overweight teen enemas or made them scavenge outdoors for food, they would be arrested and prosecuted, and rightly so.
Has anyone found the correct person to complain to?
Because all those involved are over 18. It's "consentual" humiliation. (Although, in this society, I think that informed consent is damned near impossible.)
I also think that this show's producers have the wrong things up the wrong hindquarters. They couldn't give themselves enemas because their heads are blocking the tubes' access.
Isn't this basically concentration camp for fat people? And one run by two of the sickest stick figures on the planet? What gets me (among the so many things about fat misperception) is that people, religious or not, love to bring up the Seven Deadly Sins and apparently "gluttony" is the worst sin of all. Forget about the fact that gluttony does not mean eating too much, it means "eating more than your share" (something that was no doubt quite a sin for life in the desert 6,000 years ago), but what about the other six sins? Anger, envy, pride and their pals: they're OK. But if you eat too much...well, really, shouldn't that be punishable by death???
I went to Comcast's website to look for a place to comment. I found an interesting page wherein they discuss their "commitment to diversity":
http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/About/Diversity/Diversity.html
"Our commitment to diversity is woven into the fabric of our business - it’s reflected in our workforce, our suppliers, and our principles of social responsibility. We respect the individuality and dignity of others and revel in the differences and similarities that allow us to co-exist and enhance each other. That’s the message behind the Comcast Credo, and we take it to heart."
I suppose the company is large enough that this sort of stuff sounds good and may even be put into practice on a corporate level. But it sure could use to find its way into the programming.
By the way, my husband says that Fox Network cancelled the show before E! picked it up. I thought Fox was the lowest of the low when it came to lowbrow programming... guess not.
Well said Euterpist - well said.
Shows like these are like the real life version of King's The Running Man.
The-F-Word Blog: Food, fat and feminism
That is DISGUSTING and almost incredible that they would show it on tv.
Luckly, all of 9 people will watch, just like the other seasons.
It just makes me depressed that they would do something like that - which makes me eat more and then not go to the gym. Which makes more depressed, and bigger... and the more I want to be smaller, the bigger I get.
Why did I embrace my body a few months ago, and now I don't?
I could use some help, my blogger friends....
:'(
You know, I think even the most committed of us feel like that sometimes. I'm having a huge problem with rage currently. I am so angry about the way our society treats fat people--especially fat kids--that I'm completely paralyzed into inactivity in terms of activism. I think I need to stop reading Junkfood Science...
Hang in!
Sorry - I probably shouldn't have written that last part of my post.
Hating myself right now -- but not as much as I hate The Simple Life.
It hets even better: The British show is a companion piece to the BBC's adult version of the show. The title?
"Fat Men Can't Hunt"
Yeah. Real clever. Har de har har.
Seriously, how low can Reality TV sink? I'm beginning to have flashbacks to my history of the Roman theater just before the Empire fell...