Let me just say up front that I don’t watch award shows. I don’t watch television, really. I gave up on it a long time ago. And so you can pretty much guarantee that everything I say from here onward is biased along those lines.
Evidently at the Emmy awards the head of the academy or whatever he is gave a speech which they jokingly attempted to liven up by displaying Sofia Vergara on a turntable. Feminists immediately objected to her objectification, and anti-feminist conservatives (and Vergara herself, whatever her leanings may be) countered with varying vapidity. One side says the joke wasn’t funny. The other insists it was.
We all totally missed the joke, and it was on us. The television entertainment industry just openly insulted (or accurately skewered) its audience by telling the truth disguised as a joke. Or several truths, really, such as:
- Industry execs truly see us this way. We need pretty, sexy eye-candy to make their “intellectual content” palatable. If there are messages that need to be delivered (and trust me, they have their messages they want delivered) they need to coat it with a nice layer of sex, violence and pretty people so we don’t choke on it.
- The own a whole stable of pretty people who they can get to put themselves on display any time, anywhere. People are falling all over themselves to be the richly rewarded minions willing to provide the eye-candy-coating to help the “medicine” go down.
- The industry execs think the viewing public is so stupid that they can insult us to our faces and we won’t even notice. (They may be right, from the sound of it.)
- The exploited are very good at convincing themselves they aren’t exploited.
- Sure enough, put the eye-candy out there and no one will notice the message, won’t weigh it, won’t think about it, won’t even consciously register it. But it was delivered, and no one is talking about it.
It’s times like this I have to admit we probably deserve our fate.
Richly.