Warning – Rant oncoming.
In everyone’s television viewing life there’s that classic moment we’re all familiar with: an overwhelming feeling of furious indignation at what we are seeing on our screens. Sometimes it’s a missed penalty shootout, sometimes it’s someone getting a really, really obvious question wrong – but the cause of this rant, I’m sorry to say, was something far worse. What was being transmitted was a shameless throwback to what I hoped was a long gone era of blatant gender inequality and antiquarian values.
Snog Marry Avoid? on BBC3 has, somewhere, a noble concept: take the ridiculous culture of fakery and glamour worship that proliferates at the moment in Britain (helped by the archaic, misogynist tabloids and rag magazines) and tackle it head on. It could be just the kind of programme needed today to challenge the really damaging stereotypes promoted across the media. Unfortunately, any hope of that got thrown out of the picture when they decided the format of the programme: making examples of women and (usually gay) men. Successive specimens who overindulge on fake tan, hair extensions and foundation are ‘transformed’ into middle-class fantasies of ‘natural beauty’. The aim, I think, is to make these people realise the potential of their own bodies and not rely on false additions that pander to hyped images of their media idols – and that is a very virtuous objective. In reality, however, the programme demonstrates patriarchal hegemony at its most sinister: disguising something pretty horrific as something liberating.
Would you… bother watching this programme?
The title alone is deeply regressive. Members of the public are invited to choose whether they would ‘snog, marry or avoid’ each of the subjects, both before and after the ‘make under’. The obviously selective nature of these responses aside, the basic premise of this concept is that if people aren’t worth marrying or having sex with, they have no worth at all. The programme’s strong bias towards making women the subject for inspection and placing men in the position of judgement only deepens the problem – it comes down to a basic message of ‘if a man does not want to have sex with you or make you his wife, he won’t have anything to do with you whatsoever’.
Of course the goal of the programme is to turn ‘avoid’ into ‘marry’ and, failing that, ‘snog’. Yes, that’s absolutely right, it gets worse: the message not only makes being sexually unappealing the ultimate crime, it implies a woman’s greatest aspiration is to be married! It’s in this that the programme plays its hand: it is essentially a machine geared towards preparing women for marriage. And if the producers’ attitude to marriage is as draconian as their attitude to the process of marriage preparation, I expect these will be very much subordinated, subservient wives indeed – that’s the kind of ideology they’re endorsing. The episode I was watching actively suggested that these women should change so as to conform to the male gaze, rather than making their own aesthetic judgements that they are comfortable with.
The irony is that this ‘natural’ image is as constructed as before. Looking at it objectively, this programme is taking women, stripping them of one set of aesthetic values projected on to them by a particular part of society and replacing it with another set – except this time the crucial difference is that it is now the accepted image of the patriarchal bourgeoisies. As is often the case, issues of gender are closely tied to issues of class.
I don’t think that either set of aesthetic values that the programme is eschewing and hallowing in turn is better or worse than the other. But the way these values are presented is just so cruel – we are encouraged to sneer and condemn the freak show of these women in their ‘fake’ pre-transformation state and similarly called upon to remark how beautiful they are when they are ‘liberated’ to their ‘natural look’. Clearly the producers’ do not put much stock in the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
There is such a problem in this country with the objectification of women, and that is caused not only by media obsession with role models who invite themselves to be objectified, but by this myth of what exactly is beautiful. Regardless of whether I or anyone else think that the individuals featured on this programme are better or worse after their ‘make under’ than they were before, it is not up to us to judge – it is the individual’s own opinion of themselves that matters. We should be encouraging people, both men and women, to make their own judgments about how they look – it is, after all, a means of self expression. Programmes like Snog Marry Avoid? encourage the opposite: validation of self-worth via sexual approval. Maybe not everyone is interested in getting married, maybe not everyone is interested in getting snogged – maybe people want to go out for an evening and just enjoy themselves and be happy in their own skin. I had thought, until I saw this programme, that we had moved into an age where conforming to a set of social expectations with the ultimate goal of finding a husband or wife was something only found in the novels of yesteryear, like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Rant over – David.
