TLC’s new How to Look Good Naked caught my eye in the promos, and not just because of the word naked. Giggle. OK, maybe. But I was intrigued by the idea of celebrating women of less-than-commercially/socially-ideal body types. The show comes on just after my group home guys go to bed so it was a perfect candidate for paperwork accompaniment.
I appreciate M. LeBlanc’s (the fabulous new co-writer on Bitch, PhD) review, but I don’t think the show is revolutionary. Slightly revisionary, maybe. But I don’t think a show that still says, like all the other makeover shows, “um, you’re nice, honey, but you need to spend $5000 (that’s not an exaggeration; that’s What Not to Wear, a personal fave) on a new wardrobe, have this makeup artist teach you how to hide (‘accentuate’ my ass) your natural features, color your hair (using a stylist you will never be able to afford without this show), and yes, still conform to modern western standards of beauty by choosing clothing that gives the illusion of thinness/curviness to look good.” No show that requires you to resort to enormous piles of capital to look good could be revolutionary. Of course there is the nude photo shoot, which is nice, and the people-on-the-street affirmations, which is the most touching part of the show (makes me cheer, actually). But this is all AFTER the hair and makeup.
The best part of the show is the initial in-underwear consultation in which Carson says, pre new wardrobe and makeover, “you’re beautiful and you don’t have to lose weight to be that way.” If only the show would go on that way! I suppose nobody would watch it, then–most of us like the fantasy of the ugly duckling. Capitalism has taught us that buying things will make it all better, so I don’t think a show with the patience to work on truly revolutionizing how we look at ourselves as women would necessarily sell ad space.
So what’s the problem with buying things to solve our problems, you ask? For starters, it teaches us that we have no internal resources; that the answer to our problems, no matter how abstract, is outside ourselves. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it also taught us to go to our families and communities for answers, but it doesn’t. Capitalism is isolating and divisive. I know that you’ve seen I’d-Like-to-Teach-the-World-to-Sing commercial, too, but please have at least enough cynicism to see that it gives us the warm fuzzies long enough to buy a Coke but not long enough to do the hard work it would take to really conquer world hunger and poverty. The crux of the matter is that solving problems is counter-intuitive to capitalism. In the short term it does, sure, or we’d never go back to the store. The problem is that commercial solutions are temporary because the logic of capital is accumulation and growth. Companies do not celebrate when their profits flatten out–they like nice, healthy growth. We have to keep buying for it to work. And the more we buy, the more we feel the painful side effects of capitalism: environmental devastation, spiraling poverty (wonder how Wally World gets its low prices so low?), and in the current discussion, a deeply held belief that we are not and will never be whole, good enough, truly worth something infinite and expandable (yes, even if our waistlines are).
Take off your clothes. You don’t need them to be beautiful. You don’t need your makeup, either, as I’ve discovered (oh, how pleasant it is not to de-cake my eyes every night or to have 10 extra minutes in the morning!). You don’t need a nice house or car to be deeply, passionately, and abidingly lovely and lovable.
What I don’t know how to do is to make these things true in a cultural sense. Surely we have the tools already available in culture to do so or I couldn’t be talking in just this way. But where are they and how do we use them?
I don’t know…maybe this guy has the answer.
Edited to add: Actually, this guy way deep in the comments of LeBlanc’s comments does–”One day I stood in the bathroom, looking down at my body, and I didn’t think ugh. I thought I live here. And a wave of wonder washed over me.”
Awesome.
“but not long enough to do the hard work it would take to really conquer world hunger and poverty”
Actually, free trade and capitalism are the ONLY reasons that India and China, whose countries have stagnated in abject poverty for decades, have recently turned the corner and have experienced a tremendous decrease in poverty. In a micro, how-do-I-solve-the problem-of-poor-self-image sense, you are absolutely right, capitalism does much more harm than good. In the macro, let’s-lift-starving-children-out-of-poverty sense, capitalism has succeeded where every single communist and socialist (i.e. “planned” economy”) has failed.
Soon, women in India, who in the past would have starved to death, will instead be fretting over whether or not they “look good naked.” Capitalism ain’t a pretty solution, but it is the best one for dealing with world hunger and poverty that human beings have come up with thus far.
A.S., can you point me to some research about declining poverty rates in India and China, and some research discussing the link between those statistics and capitalist practices? and that it benefits ALL members of that society? Are there other complex factors at play? Are these countries experiencing greater poverty reduction than more socialist economies (such as in Scandinavia)? Re: communism and socialism: not as practiced in some places, sure. But as practiced in the late USSR and China a few decades ago, power concentrated in the hands of a few is the ultimate end of capitalism (endless accumulation cannot result in everybody getting enough, logically), but the corruption of communism and socialism. Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge were not great equalizers. It was their rhetoric, not their practice. Better, the rhetoric was the method. Personally, I’m not convinced by socialism, either. I am currently an idealist without a home. Also, it may be that many small businesses in the hands of the previously poor are benefiting women in Third World countries. But how long will it be before larger businesses consolidate that power? That’s already happened in S. America.
Need more info, A.S. Also, is this Duke?
Hello, Do something for help those hungry people in Africa and India,
I created this blog about that subject:
in http://tinyurl.com/6kv7fu