When I told my father I was going back to school to get my masters and become a psychotherapist he replied with a question: “You want to sit in a room all day and hear people talk about their dicks?” As I think and write this many years later I can’t remember a single conversation about dicks in session with a client. We talk mostly about emotions: sadness, anger, regret, excitement, anxiety, fear. Emotions are the context, the content is what’s brought into the session – the story about the things that happened that brought up the emotions. Content and context – the story and the psychological meaning. The content of my father’s question was dicks, the context was his feelings about his son’s life choices. I didn’t need a degree to figure out what he thought of psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy, the way I choose to interact with it, is a means to examine what’s below the surface of our perceptions so one can make conscious decisions about what to water and bring forth and what to let die on the vine. As I have discussed in another post, by entering the public domain as a reality subject one leaves this decision up to producers, editors, network executives and algorithms. On social media platforms our posts do the same thing – they build a persona that has the potential to devour us. There is great reward for those that profit from online and broadcast celebrity, but there is great psychological risk as well. The TV shows and online content charts its own course with regards to what is brought forth from your personality and what is hidden. The proverbial lament of ‘I was quoted out of context’ becomes an inevitability. It’s the difference between acting and being a Reality TV star. It’s presumed that an actor has their own personality outside of the characters they portray – not so with Reality TV stars and streaming stars. A reality star (brand ambassador etc) starts by running the show and soon the show is running them.
Looking at media through the lens of my psychotherapy experience has given me greater appreciation for Reality TV and social media platforms as a prism for critical discussion of the content and context question. For the most part Reality TV is seen as the disposable unwanted guest at the table – loud, brash, vulgar, uncouth, cheap looking and fake. The drama driving the plots always centers around the idiotic: someone’s hair weave was having a bad moment, someone sat in the wrong place at a birthday party, someone spoke out of the side of their mouth. These are the contents of the reality TV moments. The contexts are always about much more. With a little digging the shallowest reality TV moment can reveal itself as a conversation about something far deeper. What is Reality TV saying to its viewers? Is there an underlying message being communicated? What is beneath the surface of cat fights, roses and drunken confessions? Are people really just there to win? Spoiler alert: the cast isn’t just sitting around talking about their dicks.
Let’s first give the term ‘Reality TV’ some shape by defining it as I have come to know it through my years as an editor. There are many genres within the world of ‘unscripted television’, as Reality TV is called en masse. There is a whole universe that includes everything from house flipping, makeover, game show, health, adventure, travel, disaster, medical, social justice and the courtroom – but when we talk about Reality TV with a capital ‘R’ we are talking about the relationship shows. These are the shows people love to hate, hate to love and cant get enough of: the Real Housewives franchises, Real World, Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Vanderpump Rules, the Kardashian franchise, Married to Medicine, Growing up Hip Hop, Shahs of Sunset, the Bachelor franchise, Ex On the Beach, Siesta Key and dozens more that I can’t remember or that are in development currently. These shows are about relationships, romance, friends, family and getting along in social constructs. As such they are important because the social dimension of our species is much more than a construct, it is a vital factor of our existence.
These relational shows are essentially women’s programming because they are about female competency and female social currency – namely that of the emotional world of relationships. In addition most of these shows have women as the core group in their audience demographic. The heartbeat of Reality TV as I have defined it (relational) is pumping its blood for women. It is the non-soapy soap opera. Whereas the daytime soaps were a conduit for female bonding and aspirations beyond the real life monotony of house-wifery, the new Reality TV animal is for the modern woman who has a job and a life, but is still essentially marginalized by a patriarchal system. Reality TV stories are stories from the rag pile of society, essentially the things that are invisible to, or discarded from the male world- the organization of the home, the structures of life outside the workplace and the emotional labor of maintaining love, friendship and alliances. Consider this: Reality TV injected new life into TV (read my post about that here) and in my opinion saved network TV’s ass. In return the establishment doesn’t even bother to include them in the Emmy Awards in any meaningful way. You know what they say, behind every great patriarchy is a great exploited population of women. (See guest contributor Bri Dellinger’s unique take on the sexism inherent in the Emmy/Reality TV question).
Women create a psychological tension to heterosexual men just by existing. They occupy a universally central focus in the male psyche, yet live in a physical world where men deny them a central roll in governance, finance and law. This tension creates anger or blindness when men are faced with female spaces e.g. it has been my observation that classic daytime Soap Operas piss straight guys off or are invisible to them. This is seemingly because the story of emotions and the struggles around them are things we as a society have not until recently fostered in our male children. Fittingly then, shows about emotion are an affront to the traditional emotionally disabled male perspective in the same way shows about climbing stairs would be to a person who has never had the use of their legs. In place of real emotions for real male children we have substituted extreme versions of emotion, namely stories about war and violence. To watch our male-centric media one must assume that normal emotions are escalated to a state of physical violence 90 percent of the time.
Most popular male stories are about the glorification of justified violence. War movies are the clearest example. I wonder what the box office take is for WWII movies alone? It’s likely many times more than the take for ‘chick flicks’. My point being that there is a lot of energy put into the male visions of emotion and almost none into the female. I recognize that the processing of a mass calamity such as war is another function of these literal War Stories, but perhaps because of the motive is profit (for the studios) there has never been an attempt to make that processing critical, and as a result all we get as a society is the retelling of the male paradigm: emotions escalate to violence resulting in a binary conclusion with a winner and a loser. The war movies equivalent in our current era are superhero movies. These movies are war movies with the absence of a traditional war. It’s a strange parallel to the position our country is actually in – we are at war but there is an absence of a traditional war effort in our daily lives (for most of us).
Whatever the complex factors, superhero movies are what is being reflected back to us on our big screens. To the credit of the varied writing staffs modern superheros have complexity that most war movies of the past do not have, though it will take hindsight to know if this is a result of the changing views of masculinity or just selling the same hotdog with a different relish. Regardless, the same dynamics are in play: emotional tensions ratchet up to violence resulting in a binary conclusion about the victor and the vanquished. Germain to this post is that the superhero world has strong parallels to the world of daytime soaps. There is a character universe, there is the completely unbelievable plots (complete with resurrections and different actors playing the same roll), there is melodramatic over the top emotional manipulations and they both never end – characters die and are resurrected, plot lines pass through generations, upside down worlds are created and on an on. And, to listen to men talk about superhero movies reminds me very much of women talking about Reality TV. They parse the decisions of the cast and bicker about the minutiae, making obscure references to past beefs, historical plotlines and alluding to other franchises within the genre. When a superhero movie premieres it is the talk of the town. Because our public lives are lived in male spaces no one says things like this about superhero movies: “Watching superhero movies are my guilty pleasure.” Or “My spouse watches that garbage.” or “I watch it when he’s not around because he makes me feel bad that I like it”. These are actual things people say about reality TV that they don’t say about superhero movies. The male-centric society does not hold an open space for women’s conversations, doing men a disservice by limiting the development of their own opinions and experiences of the gender that most of us will choose to partner with for life.
Super hero movies are accepted as a reasonable depiction of our emotional world and Reality TV is discarded or given little value. Neither is more important than the other because they both represent the content of a given moment in our culture – they are both stories about attitudes and positions we hold as a species. The context is what these stories say about our cultural arc; where have we been, where are now and where we headed. From a critical perspective I’d suggest that the Reality TV contains more depth and more complexity than male programming such as super hero movies because they are from the perspective of a marginalized population (women). Being on the outside and looking in is always a more nuanced perspective and usually points to where the society is headed. Here in America much of what we value has come from our vanguards and our outsiders. Ask yourself, what would our American culture be without the contributions of POC? If you like American music, sports, style or art I hope that was a rhetorical question. Likewise if you like American TV then I hope you’ll be open to understanding the valuable place held by the women who love watching relationships on TV instead of men in tights performing acts of violence.