A Case Against the TV: Women and Consumerism

photo: jamesmaystock.com

While reading the mind-melting, life-changing book The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard, an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, I thought a lot about the impact of our consumer-driven way of life on women specifically. In chapter 4, Consumption, she details out some of the more familiar parts of the story of Stuff: how advertising plays with our heads and gets us to buy more junk while we engage TV watching (one of our favorite pastimes), how we have to work more to have the money to buy this Stuff, and how the bulk of it is completely and utterly useless brickabrack that ends up either in a landfill or collecting dust in your closet. (She calls this the "work-watch-spend" cycle, and it's a treadmill most of us live on for much of our lives.)

I spent a good few years on that treadmill myself. I'm not here to explain to you how our economy was engineered so that we would work a ton, have too much junk, and completely and totally ruin the earth for our children and how we can fix it - to learn about that, pick up The Story of Stuff. (Ideally from a library or used book store. It really is a great read.) What I am here to explain to you is how I was a slave to the work-watch-spend cycle, and how I - inadvertently, I'll admit - managed to take break free and what it has done for me in terms of my self-image and confidence.

It goes like this: TV commercials market beauty products to young women. Over half - 56% - of commercials during shows with a high viewer population of young women focus on appearance. Compare that to just 3% of commercials aimed at men.
In the shows themselves, the appearance of women and girls is frequently commented on: 28% of the female characters have their appearance evaluated during the average show, as do 58% in the average movie. Compare this to 10% of men in TV shows and 24% in movies. (I'll do the mental math for you - women have their appearance judged in some way well over double the amount of time that men do).

And once we get into the content of the commercials, it's pretty clear exactly what is expected of young women in our society: beauty, thinness, whiteness, and perfection. It's not fun. Refer to this link for the horrifying statistics on eating disorders and other indicators of a rough landscape for the self esteem of the average American woman. Girls as young as 7 have been reported to have the disease. When you see the fresh, glowing, flawless women who grace the TV screen, it's not hard to imagine why. The more we watch, the more we are made aware of all the things that are probably going to stop us from ever having a husband and living happily every after - bad breath, underarm oder, a leg hair. Sign up for a lifetime of ugly loneliness. Unless you put in an extra hour at work and spend your hard-earned cash on the product to fix the problem, and viola! You're on the work-watch-spend treadmill. And probably nowhere nearer to your future husband, who loves you sweat and all.

So, what to do?

Well, not what I did, which was not at all an intentional and reasoned approach to cutting myself off from commercials, low self esteem, and the work-watch-spend treadmill. What I did was this: graduate college to move in with my favorite person in the world (Grandma), who has a big awesome TV. Leave my junky little TV behind with my college roommate, so she could continue to watch CNN every morning. Continue to watch TV for another year on a bigger, nicer TV. Move to Chicago with my partner, who had asked his mom to take is TV back home, as his apartment was too small and he never had time to watch it anyway. Find yourself in Chicago with no TV, but a perfectly good laptop and subscriptions to Hulu and Netflix, courtesy of the previously mentioned favorite person. Start watching one or two shows per week, adding up to about an hour, with an average of just 12 commercials at most. That you sometimes even get to choose the theme of. And when you watch Netflix...no commercials.

Not only am I a happier, more productive worker and partner without a TV, but my self esteem is far better off without the constant barrage of beautiful women telling me how I can spend money to be just as happy/healthy/beautiful/odorless/hairless/fulfilled/married-to-a-hot-guy as they are. There are times when I want one, like during election night, the world cup, or when my brother is on TV with his college marching band, but I've found that a combination of live streaming and going to bars makes due just as well, and is oftentimes more fun than my old plan of sitting by myself on a couch yelling at the TV. And now when I do sit down to watch a show on Hulu, I find that I enjoy it much more than I did when it was inevitably followed or preceded by a few other shows I didn't like as much.

While I think it's a good idea for everyone, women have much more to gain from cutting the TV out of their lives. When marketing is so disproportionately aimed at women, with a focus on looks that is literally impossible to achieve, we are forced to constantly evaluate our appreances. Whether we want to or not, we are often constantly, mindlessly comparing ourselves against the women in ads. We often end up wasting money on products that don't fix the perceived problem, meaning that our wallets and our self esteem suffer. Nothing gets fixed, and we perpetuate a viscous cycle.

Even if you don't feel like carting your TV to a second hand store today, challenge yourself to watch less TV. Try choosing just two shows to watch per week. Or try the TV Turnoff Week challenge, and unplug your TV for an entire seven days. You might find, as many do, that by the end of the week, you prefer to live life without the barrage of esteem-sapping media. I encourage you to be more intentional that I was, and give it a whirl.