News in a Barbie World

Miles and miles of Miley footage -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
I’m still huffing & puffing to catch up with my blog – work is getting busy (uncomfortably so) just two days before Christmas. Today’s blog is inspired by tabloid overload from this morning’s Today Show – and I can probably present it without too much prep time.

What do Natalee Holloway, Chandra Levy and Amanda Knox have in common? Unless you've been living under sensory deprivation, you’ll know that the first two are beautiful women who disappeared under tragic, mysterious circumstances in Aruba and D.C. respectively. Amanda is a beautiful woman who is implicated in the tragic murder of her beautiful roommate in Italy. What all three of these women have in common is thousands of hours of news coverage. Not just tabloids, but “legitimate” news venues (Time, NBC News) have devoted mountains of pages and film footage to these events.

Not to diminish the sad and sorrowful nature of these happenings, their primacy is weird in a nation that is otherwise challenged with two wars, a great recession, cancer, pollution and probably a thousand topics that are more central to our well-being. That the stories are tragic gives them the aura of “newsworthiness” that can’t be garnered from the titillating exploits of Miley Cyrus, Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. The news peddlers' fascination with beautiful women is out of proportion; they know that more ordinary women are gripped with envy and "what-if's?". Men are mostly lured by sex, albeit a glossy, unreal and unseemly aspect of sex. The observations go from the vapid (Paris Hilton sans underwear) to the lurid ("bones of missing woman found in park..."). The common thread here is that the dramatis personae are beautiful, young, generally affluent females. In fact, I’ve worked up a profile – you can compute how tabloid worthy you are...

AM I TABLOID WORTHY?

• Beautiful ...30 points
• Female ...30 points
• Young (under 30) ... 20 points
• White ... 10 points
• Affluent ...10 points

There’s no definite way of scoring this, but I’ll say you need an 80/100 to be on the front page of American Statesman. You need 90/100 for Nancy Grace to feature you obsessively.

Wanda Sykes has a whole comedy routine about the public concern over missing black prostitutes – there is no apparent concern. After a point, a john in the neighborhood might say, “Where’s all our ho’s?” A black woman can be abducted at a car wash, in front of witnesses, directly across the street from the Dallas Morning News. It will barely be a footnote under Metro events, page 7D. The above profile attributes taken together say a lot about our social values. It also has to be a fair damsel in distress, otherwise there is a marked loss of interest; a chinless woman with glasses will fall through the media cracks. Along gender lines, one supposes that men must know better or fend for themselves. There have been occasions where men have been abducted or tortured – it’ll have a better placement than 7D in the paper but not much. It certainly won’t give Greta Van Susteren material for a year’s worth of forensic expert interviews.

The victim doesn’t have to be affluent, but it helps. If the subject isn’t solidly middle class or higher, it may be seen as the necessary consequence of a squalid upbringing. The consequences are sad but not surprising. Advancing age is like masculinity – it confers a certain responsibility on the victim. “She should’ve known better .... she should’ve seen it coming”. If a 45 year old woman was abducted in Aruba people would spin it very differently ... “That old broad, she got in over her head”.

When King Kong scaled the Empire State Building, he didn’t hold a balding 35 year old man, a fat woman or a cleaning lady. He held Fay Wray, a terrified beauty with torn clothes. No detail of Fay Wray could be different – there would be no movie otherwise. Maybe society’s alter ego will someday expand beyond an idealized Blonde Venus and we’ll care about that bald-headed man. But not so much now.

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