February 02, 2007
Kill Your Television
Our own true Debbie Notkin spent a week on vacation, and wound up watching a lot of television. It seems that the remote control for the TV where she was vacationing didn't have a Mute button, so she wound up hearing a lot of advertisements:
...TV advertising appears to have shifted to focus almost entirely on what you can do to change your appearance for the “better,” while exhorting you to keep eating junk and never, ever, use your body for any kind of pleasurable movement except on an exercise bike in front of the TV. Or maybe it was always that bad, and I just don’t remember. (I think I remember more ads for clothes, or housewares, or activities.)Aside from being alternately frustrated, enraged, and fascinated by what I saw, I came away a little chastened: I think one of the reasons that it’s easy (well, easier) for me to maintain my basic satisfaction with my own body is that I’ve cut dozens if not hundreds, of negative messages a day out of my life.
Here at As I Please International World Headquarters, we don't actually want to kill our television, because we like watching DVDs from Netflix too much. But we rarely watch commercial broadcast television, so we don't see many ads.
Posted by abostick at February 2, 2007 09:53 AMI have two 24hrs news stations available. SkyTVNews is (believe it or not) much better than BBC24hrs (which is NOTHING like the World Service or radio 4). Unfortunately, Sky has ads and BBC doesn't. So what happens is, it gets tuned out and BBC wins.
I had forgotten how utterly, utterly blissful it is to have radio without commercials. Video you can pause and then skip forward, but you're stuck with the radio commercials. There was one channel of the Italian radio (the "cultural" one) that didn't use to have ads, but that fortress was conquered long ago. But BBC radio - ah, I love them.
Although I should probably have remembered to use the snoozer function tonight because the wail of a Kazhak shepherd woke me up around 4am.
(British ads seem to center mostly on: how much fruit there is in X food; how suspiciously like having sex is food Y; and how you can happily go on piling up debts if only you switch to bank/building society/debt protection agency Z. I'm not sure what this says about our national character, but at least one food ad has Stephen Fry in it, for which you can forgive a whole lot.)
Posted by: Anna at February 2, 2007 10:51 AMI'm with you on the TV thing, and I'm also thinking you're probably one of the contributing body-satisfaction elements in Debbie's life.
I'm not so foolish as to think my body is everyone's cup of tea, but nor am I so evolved that it doesn't make me feel good to know that there are some people out there who actively find bodies like mine to be good/hot/beautiful.
Posted by: serene at February 2, 2007 04:20 PMOh, and I misparsed Anna's comment as saying "at least one food has Stephen Fry in it". Now I'm trying to imagine what food that would be.
Posted by: serene at February 2, 2007 04:22 PM
