She bootylicious
This
morning I while I flipped to the local morning breakfast television, I
saw something that was absolutely hilarious after reading "Bobos in Paradise".
The camera panned on a line of shoes which the narrator explained to be
some kind of new designer shoes, even though they pretty much looked
like somebody's old sneakers. Now these shoes definitely had texture and were very down-to-earth, not very flashy like you were trying to show off or anything, but were authentic and in a balance
with yourself and the Mother Earth. The hostess of the show tried on a
pair of sandals which were supposed to make your posture good, and she
liked them, but then she made the mistake of asking what these shoes
cost. After a short pause, during which the designer was obviously
taken back and annoyed that something as gauche
as price was mentioned, he sheepishly explained that the plastic
sandals (which looked quite flimsy and like something that you could
get in Wal-Mart for $2) cost 50 dollars while the more high-end sandals
cost 170 dollars. It was almost as if the book had come to life in a
very vivid fashion.
After the morning television show, Maury Povich takes over with his show. More often than not the topic is "you my baby daddy?" Sometimes they can get quite funny, for example if the woman and her kids are lily-white and the guy is black, in kind of a reverse "My Name is Earl" situation. Never underestimate the power of human denial. We usually keep the show on so that my wife can watch the first ten minutes before taking off to work (it is so convenient to live a few blocks away from where you work), and since the show is now faster-paced than what it used to be years ago so that the results are now immediately revealed, we get to see if the first daddy dodges the bullet or not. Once you have seen one underclass loser, you have seen them all, so I usually move on to cyberspace at that point.
I find it quite revealing how deeply feminist ideas have already become part of the mainstream thinking, as evidenced by Maury's show. First, the very fact that some guy dares to have doubts about his paternity and wants to have a paternity test done is considered to be a deep moral failure from his part. For not accepting the woman's word without question, he is loudly chastised by the audience. However, if the guy is a good little profeminist and says that he doesn't really care what the result of the test is, since he is going to be the supportive father anyways, the studio audience absolutely adores him. One could not ask for a more illustrative example of how the male and female interests contradict and how many people are unknowingly slaves of sociobiology that they so vehemently deny.
After the test, if the man had denied his paternity and the DNA test proves him right (once again proving that DNA is a patriarchal tool of oppression), the sympathies of the host immediately move to the crying woman, and any attempts for the guy to mock the greedy woman who has been revealed to be a liar are immediately put to an end. The fact that the guy is angry because the woman tried to cuckold him and fraudulently extract money from him is not justified, but is considered another huge moral failure. Needless to say, if the result goes the other way, the woman and the audience get to hoot and holler and mock the guy to their heart's content. A slight double standard here, anyone?
Watching the show "Flavor of Love" is always great fun. During each episode, I have to mentally revise my estimate of the guy's net worth upwards, since I find it easy to imagine what would happen if some little runt who looked like Flavor Flav but had zero money tried to behave the same way with women, nicely illustrating what women really find attractive in men, compared to what they say they do.
However, last week I came to a sudden realization of the real social significance of this show, which is quite different. This show basically gives us a preview of what life will be like in a hundred years, when the standard of living has become so high that the average person has the same material standard of living that Flavor currently enjoys. Most men won't probably bother to be very serious, but simply play and have fun and act all goofy. And why not? If you had your own virtual holodeck, why would you bother with the toil and moil of life that is under the constraints of scarcity, or bother to obey social structures and conventions that emerged from these constraints but are irrelevant once those constraints are history?
After the morning television show, Maury Povich takes over with his show. More often than not the topic is "you my baby daddy?" Sometimes they can get quite funny, for example if the woman and her kids are lily-white and the guy is black, in kind of a reverse "My Name is Earl" situation. Never underestimate the power of human denial. We usually keep the show on so that my wife can watch the first ten minutes before taking off to work (it is so convenient to live a few blocks away from where you work), and since the show is now faster-paced than what it used to be years ago so that the results are now immediately revealed, we get to see if the first daddy dodges the bullet or not. Once you have seen one underclass loser, you have seen them all, so I usually move on to cyberspace at that point.
I find it quite revealing how deeply feminist ideas have already become part of the mainstream thinking, as evidenced by Maury's show. First, the very fact that some guy dares to have doubts about his paternity and wants to have a paternity test done is considered to be a deep moral failure from his part. For not accepting the woman's word without question, he is loudly chastised by the audience. However, if the guy is a good little profeminist and says that he doesn't really care what the result of the test is, since he is going to be the supportive father anyways, the studio audience absolutely adores him. One could not ask for a more illustrative example of how the male and female interests contradict and how many people are unknowingly slaves of sociobiology that they so vehemently deny.
After the test, if the man had denied his paternity and the DNA test proves him right (once again proving that DNA is a patriarchal tool of oppression), the sympathies of the host immediately move to the crying woman, and any attempts for the guy to mock the greedy woman who has been revealed to be a liar are immediately put to an end. The fact that the guy is angry because the woman tried to cuckold him and fraudulently extract money from him is not justified, but is considered another huge moral failure. Needless to say, if the result goes the other way, the woman and the audience get to hoot and holler and mock the guy to their heart's content. A slight double standard here, anyone?
Watching the show "Flavor of Love" is always great fun. During each episode, I have to mentally revise my estimate of the guy's net worth upwards, since I find it easy to imagine what would happen if some little runt who looked like Flavor Flav but had zero money tried to behave the same way with women, nicely illustrating what women really find attractive in men, compared to what they say they do.
However, last week I came to a sudden realization of the real social significance of this show, which is quite different. This show basically gives us a preview of what life will be like in a hundred years, when the standard of living has become so high that the average person has the same material standard of living that Flavor currently enjoys. Most men won't probably bother to be very serious, but simply play and have fun and act all goofy. And why not? If you had your own virtual holodeck, why would you bother with the toil and moil of life that is under the constraints of scarcity, or bother to obey social structures and conventions that emerged from these constraints but are irrelevant once those constraints are history?
Comments